every day something changes.

It took me a little longer than I expected, but I instated my new blog today. It's about time. I switched to WordPress because there is more freedom and because the music blog I worked for before I left for New Zealand taught me how to use it. It's just prettier in general, I think.

So here's the new location: http://carriemelissa.wordpress.com/.

See you there, I hope.

changing every day.

It has been a long time, and I need to wipe myself clean of this. This blog has held a lot of secrets of mine. They are disorganized, jumbled, idealized, and also very real to me. Reading them makes my heart twist. I feel I can wring it out and let it dry.

I am home again, one year after my first homecoming. It feels the same, but much more open. I feel I have the courage and confidence to find a job this time around, now that I've given it some time.

Tomorrow begins my quest, and so tomorrow begins the beginning of a new way of chronicling the new journey. It will be a bit more cheeky, probably less personal (sometimes my heart aches at how personal I've been here, and I know all of this is deeply true and deeply open, and that is what hurts), and more helpful to the random reader. I will post the web address here tomorrow for anyone who may actually still read this dusty chronicle of my post-adolescence.

a short summation of close to half a year.

Somehow five months have passed. I've traveled and I've swum in the ocean on Christmas. I've eaten beans on toast and been to crazy parties. I've laid on the pebbles at the beach until 6 am (later, I found the pebbles down my pants). I've watched the sun rise from Mt. Doom and cried myself to sleep. I've read and I've pulled weeds and sat in the burning sunlight all afternoon. I've gotten numerous sunburns and some have even turned into suntans.

For the moment, I am settled. I spend my days with people from all over the world and fall asleep with the television on. Then I wake up at 5 in the morning and do it all again.

I have no home, but each day I make it work. I define home in new ways, through new people. And last night, I fell asleep in someone else's bed.

I am sorry I can't write more, but life moves too quickly. But my tattoo is constantly reminding me that I need to get myself together and keep writing. When I get home again, I will write every day. Or something.

as the kiwis do.

Time has slipped away from me. I am in Blenheim and it's hard to distinguish between Monday, Tuesday, and all those other days of the week.

In Auckland, Marie and I would go out until 4 am. We had BBQs with Kiwis, ate hokey pokey by the beach, played mini golf with two Kiwis and a German, and I personally spent a lot of time hungover. To be constructive, we also hiked a volcano and went to some beautiful North Island beaches. We slept in an attic one night and I felt homesick sometimes, but it was all right.

In Christchurch, we walked around and shopped at handmade craft stores. We went out for Halloween with a Swedish guy and an Australian. We took tequila shots and sang karaoke at an underground bar filled with New Zealand-transplanted Asians. We danced on stage at a nightclub and laughed before taking jager bombs. We walked home in the chilled air and we ate KFC at 3 am. We made the best and smelled flowers and all that shit.

The train to Picton was breathtaking. The morning clouds cleared away, revealing groups of sheep and cows huddling and grazing together. The ocean came out of nowhere.

We hitch hiked to a small home in Rai Valley, where we spent 2 days walking country roads, talking all night over tea, eating homecooked meatballs and potatoes and eggs and ham, and playing badminton with a bunch of locals.

Now we are working on vineyards in Blenheim. The fog clears in the morning across endless rows of grapes. We live in a hostel with a bunch of Germans and a few other Europeans. I do not judge the passing of time. I think about love and how blurry its definition can become and how clear it can seem at times. I think of a dark bedroom in Culver City that feels like it never existed. I smile when I think of breakfast burritos and the beach and falling asleep in Agoura Hills. I usually imagine this as I fall asleep at night and I wake up feeling strangely at home, but strangely dislocated. I feel excited for the past and for the future, but I live in the present. This is because I have a hard time connecting my past to my days here and I have a hard time envisioning where the future will take me.

As the days fall away, I realize I am happiest with a cup of tea and a piece of toast, swapping stories and slang from countries far away.

uhhh...

Leaving for New Zealand in, oh, two and a half hours. How the hell did this happen? Not that I'm complaining.

the sun rising.

Busy old fool, unruly sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?

Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

Late school boys and sour prenticesprentices apprentices,

Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,the king will ride James I, the king of England at the time of Donne’s writing, had a known passion for riding horses and hunting.

Call country ants to harvest offices,

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

- John Donne

in my ears and in my eyes.

I knew it was going to be hard to say goodbye to him, but how was I to know that finding out exactly how hard it would be would be harder than the impending doom brought on by imagining it?

In the park, I said I would miss him. It was perfect clarity bursting forth into the foggy afternoon.

cheezy blasters.

30 Rock completes my life. So what will I do when I get to New Zealand when I have no Liz Lemon to relate to?

seeing the waves.

If I could stop being sad for a while, well maybe then I'd be happy.

And if I were happy, maybe I'd walk out of your life with a swift goodbye, never to return again.

a color of the sky.

...Last night I dreamed of X again.
She's like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I'm glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky...

so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It's been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

by Tony Hoagland

you lied and now i can't stop thinking.

Birthdays come and go. They pile up and you forget them. Sometimes you sleep right through them. They arrive and disappear, and each year, it feels the same. I remember thinking not even six months ago that I would never worry about getting old. But as I watch television and read books, I'm constantly reminded of time passing and the fact that I've accomplished so little that I've set out to accomplish. I hate birthdays because they remind you of that. When I get to the birthday where I can say I've finished grad school, live in a place I love, have a job that challenges me/own my own business, and am surrounded by people I love, maybe then it will be a cause for celebration. This year, it was a farewell birthday.

It's been a really tough year for me: I let go of a damaging, cyclical relationship that was going nowhere; I graduated college into the worst job market in decades; I had to let go of my independence and move home for a while; I said goodbye to many of my friends who graduated.

But it's also been a wonderful year for me: I took action and am going to New Zealand, I fell in love with myself and met someone new, I let go of resentments from past relationships, I met new friends, I got an internship at a pub house I love, I went out a lot and finally discovered Los Angeles on my own terms, I resolved disputes with my friends, I wrote a thesis, I presented a thesis, and so on.

Looking at the list, I see the good outweighs the bad. I know this is only because I let go of past hurts. I know that this is something I must do in the future. I refuse to sleep through my next birthday. Instead, I hope to celebrate the small triumphs of my year and hopefully some larger ones too. And I hope I can get over the fact that he hurt me and move on with my life so I can restore my faith in relationships once again. It always breaks down and builds back up again, and I've done it over and over. That's how I know it will be okay.

almost to my valediction.

I seem to have acquired a terrible case of writer's block in the last few weeks. Someone once told me that in order to get over this sort of affliction, you just have to work right on through it. I worked through it with a note; I worked through it with words on top of words.

I left a note on your pillow for the very last time. Writing it, tears fill my eyes. I imagine your eyes skimming my words, dry and dark, deep and understanding. Understanding, but something tells me they do not empathize, they do not get at the core of how I am feeling. I think I am alone in that way. I wonder at your strength as the tears dry where they were never truly started.

The sky has turned a dark gray. And as it gets darker, I imagine the morning sky embracing blackness and turning itself around into night. In the nighttime, I imagine your arms cradling me, putting me to sleep. I try to remember how I fell into bed the night before, if you held me at all. Nothing comes back but blackness. In the morning, you tried to tuck in all the covers around me, but I whimpered and the ceiling spun again. I closed my eyes and tried to take it back, my last night in your bedroom. Instead, you closed your door and said "sleep." I slept. For what felt like days, I tossed and turned on your mattress, battling back against a throbbing headache caused by the emptiness of your indented pillowcase. If there was anything conscious in my sadness of sleep, it was my awareness of the nothing you leave when you are gone.

I finally wake up enough to take a shower. I speak to your roommate for what is probably the last time, take a shower in your bathroom, leave hair in your drain, brush my teeth. I take a pen off of your desk (which used to be mine, and I miss terribly the way it used to sit in my luminous room beside the bed we first slept in and the nightstand where I kept my journal) and rip a piece of paper from your notebook.

I begin to write. At first it is slow. I write your name. I see myself here again in the month of June, with the heat already coming in through your open window at 9 AM. I see myself here in May, our bodies wet from the hot tub, my eyes wet with tears I could no longer hold back in the darkness. I see myself here in May, where we first began, wishing it were April again, so I could meet you all over again and we could go back to my apartment and drink wine while tracing our fingers along a map of the United States of America (several days later, I was re-tracing your steps to California, going back to Chicago, where you started). I see myself on your bed that morning in October. It is my birthday. My head is spinning and my hair is wet. My eyes haven't started filling with tears yet. I see you left me a bottle of water, and I put the pen to the paper and breathe.

It is hard to know where to begin, so I tell you I will miss you. I don't tell you that I already do. I don't tell you I can feel that you've already left in so many ways. I begin with memories of you and I, and I find that I can't stop writing. Your apartment is full of memories: early mornings, late mornings, salmon, waffles, breakfast burritos, late nights, early nights, wine, watching television, margaritas, swimming, surfing, kissing, cuddling, smoking, so much laughter, ice cream, running errands, eating dinner, slipping out of my jeans and into your bed that starts out so cold until you follow me and I feel your breath against my forehead and you kiss me and it leaves a warm, damp mark. I keep writing, and I can't stop, and, by the end, I am crying until I see your dry eyes in my head, and I get angry.

I feel like time has gotten away from us both. Somehow one night turned into seven months. We barely spoke of the future, and we never spoke of the past. Seven months, and I still know so little. I only know that you are stronger than I am. I only know that when you picked up that note, you didn't cry like I did when I wrote it. I wish my words had the power to translate all of the ways you meant something to me, but something tells me they don't. That is the curse of words: I can cry and write them, and you can smile and never understand a thing I say.

making sense of moving abroad.

My favorite places in the world I've been are:

Galway, Ireland
Killarney, Ireland
Youghall, Ireland
Half Moon Bay, California
Venice Beach, California
Puerto Vallarta, Mexico (down on the Marina or off on a deserted island)
Parque Guell, Barcelona, Spain
Chicago, Illinois
Savannah, Georgia
Eze Village, Southern France
Smokey Mountains, Tennessee
Sunderland, Northern England

Here's the theme: water. There's a large body of water in each of these places, and that's why I know New Zealand was a good pick. No place in New Zealand is further than seventy-five miles from the ocean. Italy may be next. Mostly because it makes sense geographically.

say what now?

One week until my birthday, three weeks until New Zealand. My internship ended yesterday, and I don't remember how to have free time.

My final days in America look like this:
This weekend: Santa Cruz
Next week: packing, tying up loose ends
Next weekend: my birthday, friends from LA visiting
Two weeks from now: Go to LA, finish getting ready
Two weekends from now: Treasure Island Music Festival
Three weeks from now: New Zealand

three four two one.

Had a wonderful weekend in Napa with Alex and his sister and their friends.

In other news, in France, a politician from the president's party is gunning for a warning label placed on all retouched photographs in the media. It would read: "Retouched photograph aimed at changing a person's physical appearance." Interesting. I know that reading that in magazines as a pre-teen would have had a dramatic effect on me, and I am hoping something like this catches on in America in the future. Certainly would save a lot of people from misinterpreting their own imperfections.

marcella

Marcella was born at 4:49am on September 24. Out of the many babies I've seen born (just kidding), she's definitely the cutest.

and then and then and then.

I keep disappearing lately. It's mostly because I do not allow myself to write in my blog at work and then I refuse to use the computer after a long day of screen-staring at the office.

Some sort of news:

• My best friend went into labor yesterday at 11:30AM. She's still in the early stages and it's been more than 26 hours. I can't even imagine what that must feel like-- an unstoppable approaching hurricane and a mixture of elation and exhaustion and pain and bliss. I haven't been able to sleep well for worrying, and I feel like I can't call her because this is such a sacred time in her life. I'm not sure if I've ever felt so helpless.
  
• I'm going to be in the city all weekend. Wine tasting on Saturday in Napa and the rest will just be chilling out and eating a lot of good food.
• New Zealand wtf
  

bad television and being a woman.

I absolutely love feminism and the non-radical notion that we should secure equality for all genders at all times in all situations. I love what it has done for generations of women before me, my own generation, and what it will most certainly do for the generation to follow.

But I'm also pissed at you, feminism, because you've ruined Glee for me. I can't watch it without thinking of how simple and one-dimensional the female characters are. I can't enjoy MTV even a little bit. I can't listen to rap music without making snide comments. I hate the portrayal of the timid, disempowered female character in Eastbound and Down.

I'm not sure what the solution is here. I have been using irony for a long while. But maybe I just genuinely like the song "Best I Ever Had." What am I supposed to do about that?

I think third-wave feminists are facing a particularly complicated struggle, and they don't get nearly enough credit for all of the intellectual work involved in being a feminist today. While first- and second-wave feminists had clear goals, ours are opaque. Sure, there is the obvious abortion rights debate and the issue of equal pay, but we've realized that all of this is born out of how we are portrayed in the media, so our goals are now more like "change the way women are represented in television, movies, music, in casual conversation, in drunken conversation, over the phone, on blogs, in advertisements, on youtube videos..." Then comes the question of who is doing the looking at these women? If it's one person, it could be empowering. If it's another, it could be objectification. Take the porn debate, for instance. Porn stars and other sex-positive feminists argue that the women are the "queens" of this domain. They make the most money, achieve the most fame, and are overall more successful than men. At the same time, though, they are profiting off of selling their bodies to the male gaze. They're not enjoying that sex-- it isn't even realistic and they all effing know it.

My own awakening is only just beginning. Maybe I'm late, but I don't really think I'm too far behind. These complexities have become so much more real to me outside of the idyllic university setting. Now I am awakening to my own role as a woman in this society. It's messy and stressful and, gosh darnit, I just want to sit down, relax, and watch Glee.


*That picture is just funny.

volunteer me.

Community service is clearly selfish because I had the most amazing night sitting next to two chatty 87-year-old women and the sweetest woman and joking around with people who were three times my age.

Barack Obama promotes volunteer work, and I'm all about it. Everyone should take a look at their own community and see all the ways they can give back. Or I also suggest www.idealist.org. Find a way to help in your area.

stay with me.

I forgot I had a blog. I apologize.

After writing an album review, 4 news pieces, biking 9 miles, running 3, and biking another 3, I feel like I'm done for the day. Instead, I have to go to a 3-hour training for this volunteer thing I'm doing. There's something wrong with me.

Also, I'm very frightened what will become of me after I get back from New Zealand, but how the hell am I going to worry about this now?

Vapid, shallow, boring. I apologize again.