many lamps

 Throw on all your lights.
Dress yourself in the warm tones
Cast against the windows which
Become walls in the night.
Slabs of night pressed up cool
Against your tungsten shield.
We pray with electricity
We sway with the hairs
in the light-bulbs above us.

How many lamps will it take to
Drive away the fear? 

Whispy

Last weekend I felt the soles of my feet warmed by the sun for the first time this year.
All I could do was close my eyes and stretch my toes; the touch of the sun took all my concentration. In the backyard I was surrounded by the reincarnation of dandelion blooms, the white-tops trembling in the breeze. An uneven line of bare-headed stalks signaled the pathway of people and animals through the grass. Everything leaves its mark.

That was a week ago.
And now I need to study for my midterm. But this morning the sun woke me up instead of the rain. It came right through my eastward window, telling me, "its time its time its safe again." I fell asleep late last night -- the sirens in the city were loud and melancholy. In the country my sirens are coyotes and the thunderstorm.

Happiness comes slowly, and sometimes must contend with many other feelings. That's okay, that is the way of things.

I've just always felt like there is something to say

The town that I grew up in sits on the edge of a wide river, which flows down our valley until it tumbles out into the Columbia river basin, sweeping cargo ships over the river mouth and out to sea. It is a two-hour drive to the ocean but I still feel like I grew up with a sense of its character, the salty tide that is always changing. The westward wind brings with it a briny flavor, mixing into the smell of topsoil that pioneers and natives gave their lives for. Gulls would meet in the field behind my elementary school when winter storms raged along the beaches. During recess my friends and I would scatter them, running through the flocks until it felt like we were letting the birds loose, lifting them from their earthy bonds and returning feathers to the wind. We thought of ourselves as heroines, and the birds tolerated our actions.

Passing Through

“There are consequences for life.”

This my mom says over the phone as I sit outside my house on Friday afternoon. It’s a tense conversation because we are trying to work together to map out the direction of a fast-approaching future—am I coming home for the summer, where am I working, who am I—but I’m not willing to commit to anything yet. Everything holds possibility and that responsibility is stressing me out. I can feel it like Velcro: the hard, scratchy side warm in my palm, waiting for contact with its softer counterpart. Unattached Velcro is desire, materialized. Desire, wrapped up in waiting—a product of the time line we are born into.  I am quiet until I sigh, saying,
“I know, mom.”

            “No, I don’t think you do.” She says.

Today Tate built a fort in our living room. We called the boys over and cacooned ourselves inside it while Trifon read us short stories found on Google.  One story about a small town ghost, one about a certain Dr. Panini; mad scientist PHD. Google is an excellent holding room for second-rate literature. We made waffles and opened a bottle of wine and held a double feature on my computer. The movies watched: Wrist Cutters and Mr. Nobody. I recommend both.

Brad tells us of a dream he had once. In it he is a soldier, an officer of some rank. There are people testing dynamite, they use a door to keep the flame from reaching the pile of explosives. As Brad keeps watch over them, directing them in their duties, the people began to disappear. One after another they saunter off into dream-darkness. Brad is very nervous—there is no longer anyone to keep the flame from reaching the dynamite.
“Fine!” He yells,
“We’re all going to die!”
Exhausted, anxious, he wakes up in his own bed, drenched with the need to pee. Terror blocks in the emotions of the dream as Brad faces the decision. If he runs to through his door to the bathroom, he risks breaking what his mind is telling him is the only thing keeping his house from violently exploding. Or, if he chooses to not move, Brad wets the bed. We all laugh when he says he chooses to risk the explosion. No thing is worse than a wet bed.

I am caught off guard. I feel unbelievably connected to the moment of choice roiled in fear and confusion that Brad described. It’s a threshold moment that lately I feel often. It’s where we pause to size up the outside world against our own inscape, deem our self insufficient against the odds and our end imminent, yet move on anyways.

The threshold moment can last forever.

There are consequences here, and deep fears that predate self-awareness. Nightly I pass through these thresholds, doorways of final existences and of making peace with life and the end of it. But then I choose to finally sleep or accept death and am through the door completely. Waking up I find myself the same, or at least still whole—physically unharmed. Deep breathing and a filtering sunrise distills my terror. I have returned to the morning, and downstairs my housemates are making waffles for breakfast.

Marking the Blank Slate

I'm having trouble collecting my thoughts, obviously.

A woman makes her play in a dimly lit poker game, and leans over to collect the win.

Bicycle project, South Africa

people doing things,

beautiful people.
please click this link to watch a bicycle photography project from south africa. I'm sick for Cape Town.
mmmm

It is loud here.

I feel easily annoyed lately.
There is a group of three young persons to my immediate right. Their conversation is sharp enough to pervade over the speakers of the cafe and over my little head phones. I tell you this not because you should care, but because the decibel and subject matter of their conversation is making it hard for me not to care.

Yesterday my friend Katty cut my hair.
While we were waiting for our bleach to process we sat on the couch in her living room and ate some cheeses I had brought as a thank you. Hair cutting between friends can be an intimate process. She said to me and to the room, "Sometimes it blows my mind how many people are all living here, on top of each other." I agreed. I feel the same thing sometimes, about this city. I feel it overwhelmingly. 

Today was warm.
Matt, Missy and I found this trail in discovery park that led from the tip of the dunes through a forested path to the brink of a small beach. Not a secret beach, I know, because there were little stacks of rocks and different carvings of names into driftwood -- people must always leave signs of themselves. But it was quiet and lonely and happy enough for us three to believe we were all the world for a few hours. we filmed some scenes for a small movie in Chapel on Tuesday about the end of the book of Joshua. Or at least, the way we feel about the end of it. Its this people, looking for land -- suffering from the sins of their fathers and mothers; learning from the love of their fathers and mothers. Seeking something from a creation that they are holding on to with fists -- though it always seems to be slipping through their hard and earthy palms.

You know, a stone thrown in the water sends ripples in every direction.

Thoughts from El Diablo

my shoulders are sore from pulling so close to my neck today. I've been sitting in this wooden chair for a while, and I've forgotten again to remind my body to not get so tense. When I am thinking, my shoulders pull together and jaw sets and my chin leans down until its intimate nearness to the vicinity of the table I am working on reminds me to pull up, pull up! again before I am unseemly in the public eye: girl, slumped on table, arms outstretched and still typing, drool.

Obviously my goal is to always be attractive.

I'm happily getting lost. In this other world. It's a world where characters have desires and are motivated by them in turn and the movement of words is everything. And it is melding into this world, this one where I lay somewhat prostrate on the cafe table. I am looking around and thinking: what is your desire, and where is your motivation? Is there a motivation?

and then

Oh look, I found it, you just hid it a little deeper here -- lift the covers of a late night text or a casually intimate question and all of a sudden people and characters are sitting maybe too close for comfort. But no no no.
that's not entirely true.

Because something burns brighter than what I am creating. I guess that is the curse/challenge/adventure of writing an art. The thing you love, the thing you chase, to know and to touch, it will always be outpacing you. And that is beautiful.

Just make sure the thing you love can return it somehow too.
A runner needs her water. 

For Fear I've Kept Myself From Posting

Fear is the root of all things.
People say that, don't they.
A rhetorical question, I know -- It's because, frankly, I don't have to ask you -- we all know people say that.

And I guess I believe it too.
For fear I have kept myself from speaking. For fear I have left a question hanging. With fear I've held the quiet parts that would reveal a me
which I fear that I am not ready yet to see.

It's fall in Seattle. I don't know how it is done, but that moment between the 31 of October and the first of November seems to stretch forever. These months are two different worlds. In the cooling blue skies of October I can still remember the summer, but once November opens her eyes I feel unable to look any way but forward.
So I am looking forward.
Two years left of school is a long time.
In twenty years I will be forty.

When I am old, I would like to be happy. I would like to still be able to listen and not just talk. I would like to still be able to eat ice cream and other shit like that, but my grandma had diabetes so we will see.
My mother has pictures of her mother's hands on an old digital camera. It is beautiful: both the pictures and to watch my mother look at them.
I hope you get the chance to someday.

Listen: the way I am going to live is different than what the people say. I am twenty -- I get to believe things like this.
I am going to upheave the gardens of fear patterned into my heart and sew instead the wild seed of love. I am already doing this. Love for myself and for you. For Love I speak and do not speak. For love I question and I seek. With love I hold the quiet parts I'm remembering are me.

Up and down, but our elevation will never be the same.

And loving yourself is one of the most powerful tools on the path toward contentment.

Whose Afraid?

Another imitatio.
I wrote this in the style of much-revered Virginia.
If you are looking for something wise and wonderful, read her "On Being Ill," An essay.


An Ode To the Silent E at the End of Ode:

In regard to the silent O at the beginning of opossum, to the quietest l in the middle of colonel, to the B at the end of lamb, when a group of friends gather upon the deck of a private yacht, mingling in the cool autumn knight, what ideas and concepts are discussed there, with no mention at all of the C that alone holds the entirety of the Y A to the H T, that without it the whole thing could quite possibly fall apart, and does, collapsing upon itself and tumbling into the water where the bourgeois party-goers numb their thumbs in the icy depths and find themselves in debt for the destruction of a rather expensive yacht that is now just a yaht all the while saying ‘I never knew – I mean I never kenew’ because they have finally realized the gravity of their mistake – when we learn of this, that which we can so easily neglect, it is strange indeed that these letters have not yet risen up in rebellion to the abusive authority that has caged them in an iron realm of silence and neglect and solitude since the birth of all spoken languages.

Written in the Style of Kerouac. Forgive Me, Jack.

And in the dark Living Room one lamp is on as I sit on the old couch we found watching the light from the small, single bulb lap at the corners of the room and feeling all that space that rolls immeasurably up and into the mind, all those memories building, but in the future I know it will still be the same mind this mind of mine, though our atoms are always shifting, and don’t you know that for a moment you will be made from the same molecules as Shakespeare? the bulb burns out and leaves a softer, humming darkness than what was just before and I am filled with a brown-black that reminds me of the country, of the creases in your eyes, the smell of leather and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen except that maybe time may hurt to everyone, and I think of being born, the most important beginning that I cannot remember, I think of being born.

Welcome Back Front Door Mat

hey yall

Are you still there? Do you remember me? And, how do you do this again? It is my first blog post in oh-so-long. I am afraid I have lost all my readers. I am afraid of this because everything I know about blogging I learned from links in Margaret Atwood's twitter, and she says you should always blog consistently. Readers need consistency. Blogs are habits. Put your habits into a blog. It's a symbiotic relationship, you know? So in light of this, I'm going to open this window again into my life; currently.

I am thirsty. I am in my living room, with good people. I have been with good people all day. I would like to think I am prone to believing that most people are good. But we are all cynics, aren't we? Today Tyler, Ruth, Hailey, James, Tate and I went apple picking at the Jones Creek Farm. I had never been apple picking before, but now I have a box full of them on my kitchen table. I will make sauce. Apple sauce. I would like to make cider as well, but you need a cider press for that. My neighbors have a press, when I lived in Oregon we would help Nancy and Steve, in the fall, press apples into juice. I remember Nancy telling me to throw in all the apples -- even the ones with bugs. Protein, she said. The eternal joke of protein.

Tyler and Ruth are playing scrabble. I was playing with them earlier, but I was the only one keeping score. I gave up because I realized that their only motivation involved how many "pretty" words they could create. I was done once the word tada entered the board. I was done once I realized they weren't playing for points, they were comparing which words would make the best cross streets to live on. I live on Sunlit and Heron. Tada and Saint. What ever guys. I'm motivated by competition.

We do have a great living room, however. We have a great porch as well. If you are ever in the area, Emerson street, please come by. It is full of people, good wood and light.
I am happy, can you tell?
Testify.

I am going to post this without rereading it:

Today was cool and grey. The wind must have blown our hot august days right up and over the cascades. Will they come back for one last visit? No one knows now, not even the weather man.

Yesterday I was laying on my floor with my good friend computer ( no, we're not seeing each other,) and I happened to looked out the window. Along the driveway that leads to my house are maple trees. The farthest one away, I could just make out, had the tint of yellow on the tips of its leaves. Like your best guy friend from 7th grade, the one with the bleach-frosted tips. (cough cough @tyler mccabe,) It was weird to have to accept in that moment that autumn is coming for us. I don't know about you, but I just got my first real sunburn last Saturday.
I guess to see the onslaught of fall means I have to admit the secession of summer. And this summer has been one that I have waited a long time for. I mean, we all grow up dreaming of far away places. It is built into the childhood liturgy, thanks to more than just Disney and Dreamworks. But these last few months I actually got to go far, far away. I saw things that were made of magic, both the fairy-godmother kind and the dark black kind.

But now I have returned. And then it's back to Seattle. I am ready.

Welcome Back to Summer

Run;
Steady movement of hips to thighs to heels to toe.
I will miss the steady rhythm of hamstrings when I'm old.

My friend gave up his smoking during spring in preparation for summer running. Wise man. I too enjoy my breath this evening. The air is heady with august, my body works to filter through the woodsmoke, timothy hay, queen anne's lace, and blackberries turning dark in the road-side ditch. A combine rumbles to life and a bi-plane hangs low over head. What a strange Eden this is; where everything is always green yet I walk through most of it only ever touching a carpet of black tar. I have to remind myself to leave the road. Little girls grow up laughing and the only convenience store on the corner sells gasoline and porn magazines. 

I would like to say I am not an emotional person. Not because I want it to be that way, just that I expect it is true. But this doesn't keep me from being anxious, reminiscent, sentimental. Would it be strange to say that I am led to my emotions fastest through every sense that is not the sense of sight? The nose knows memories and loss. The ears are capable of great desire. But I am afraid of these eyes that are cold and calculating, taught with great care to rationally account for everything being taken in. 


I am still running and there is a man on the side of the road. I can feel him looking at me and I keep running still, because one thing you learn in Europe and South Africa is to not make eye-contact with a single man. In the end I look at him anyways, because I cannot truly forget my small-town-girl sensibilities. He is telling me something. I take out my headphones and listen harder. "Walk over here," 
"What?" I say - 
"Just walk here, please." I run a little faster because I think he is asking me to come over by him, where he is standing just off the road in the timothy hay. But then from the underside of the hay explodes a pit bull. Barking and growling, it charges me and I freeze. It snaps at my left leg and I back up, so it begins to circle me and bite at the air. My heart races and finally the owner coaxes the animal back to the side of the road. "I was asking you to walk slowly," The owner explains, like it is my fault, "She is just a year old and will attack any bikers and runners." Well good to know, and isn't this road public? Yet I walk away slowly and only pick up my original pace when I can't see him or the animal anymore. 


When I saw the pit-bull rushing me, I was afraid. I saw it's glinting eyes and open teeth and felt fear. I laugh a little now because I realize that my eyes are not incapable of emotion, like I first believed. 


My eyes are where I feel my fear. 


I am also laughing because the pit-bull scene has kind of sprung me from my earlier dreamy trance and I feel that my thought pattern was possibly a little too melodramatic. 


But I cannot shake the idea of a connection between my sight and my fears. In that connection I make a little hole and climb back through my memories to South Africa. It is no longer summer but winter and my eyes are overwhelmed with the work of rationally accounting for shack after shack crowded for miles along the busy highway. Too much Too much I think and I feel fear. Then I am walking at night in Cape Town and a black man approaches. I feel fear and then I am overwhelmed as he passes me, I am overwhelmed by shame and confusion and the unreliability of these things that we call eyes, yeux, ojos, so that we may better understand the reality of the world. 

Walking in Cape Millay, Part One

okay.

For those reading, the distance between me and my home has been extended greatly for the next several months. A sea-distance away from three sisters kingdom.

I am falling in love with South Africa.
Cape Millay is a community on the west side of Capetown. It is tucked away past the Museum Mile, past the wild nights of Long Street, and past Queen Victoria's Botanical Gardens. A few sky scrapers rise from the pavement, but do not dwarf Table Mountain which holds court over the city. The mountain does seem to watch over everything - people refer to Capetown as the Mother City because from a distance the rocky skyline adopts the figure of a reclining woman, cradling the city. It is comforting. What a figure to take shape over a place that has also doubled as the boiling pot for a violent clash of politics, history, and humanity.
Cape Millay is about a ten minute walk from The Backpack - the hostel where I am staying. Row after row of two story cement houses nestle against cobble stone streets that push up against the side of the mountain. (Aproximately the mother's neck.) Each house is painted a bright pastel color that compliments the whole neighborhood ascetic. When I say pastel, do not imagine kitchsy easter-egg adds from Fred Meyer. Instead, these colors adopt a stoic dignity when carefully painted throughout the neighborhood. You can feel the care and time put in to each house. They have stood here for ages, but the pain is as fresh as yesterday. Pinkgreenturquoisepinktanyellowgreen. "This wouldn't work if one house was by itself," Tyler says next to me. "But together, this creates something beautiful." He is right, and we walk further in - entranced by the colors, the linen strung between windows to dry, the dog sleeping in the shady doorway. In the distance the call to prayer is heard from the top of a mint-green mosque.

By the Way, I'm In South Africa.

It is raining. Thick and heavy drops fall as if previously held in some giant's hands. Maybe Gods. We; 16 students, two adults, and a seven year old, run up the stone stairs of the Cape Town art museum. We've escaped the torrential downpour for now.




"Ja, there can be four seasons in one day in South Africa," We are warned by a tour guide.



June means winter for the residents of Capetown, but that doesn't keep the parks from being full of bright, juicy flowers and big game ducks with bright yellow eyes. The interior of the art museum echos the colors of the park outside, except for one exhibit. This section of the museum is dedicated to the black and white photography of Ranjith Kelly, an 85 year old artist from Durban.



In the last 85 years, Kelly has held a lens to the extreme climates of social, political, and economic change in South Africa. One picture in particular caught my attention. It depicted a man and woman, emerging from a public building. You can easily tell they are a couple - frozen in their walk; they lean towards each other. The man is Colored, the woman is White. The implications of this relationship are spelled out in the caption underneath; A couple exiting jailhouse after breaking Immorality Act: 1960.



Immorality act. When I was young, I was taught that being immoral meant stealing, or maybe hiding my little sister's barbies under her bed. As far as I could tell, these two individuals had commited neither attrocities. Wikipedia had the definition: "The Immorality Act (1950–1985) was one of the first apartheid laws in South Africa. It attempted to forbid all sexual relations between whites and non-whites."



In the museum, I sit down on the bench accross from the photograph. "What is morality?' I wonder. The word itself is an abstraction. Purity. an abstraction. There seems to be a strong link drawn between these two words in apartheid days. To be moral is to be pure, and vica versa. Intrinsicly woven together, these terms slip into the political rhetoric of world leaders seeking justify their ethnic cleansing or segregation policies.



Well, what are the consequences when these abstractions are projected onto people? The "Pure" are celebrated and justified. The "Impure" are de-humanized and repressed.



There is an obvious problem with this catagorizing. Human beings can never be fully contained by legislation. It's like trying to hold the whole ocean in your fist; eventually the moon calls it home. The tide ebbs out and over the crevaces, spilling out below. The whole process is impossible and unretainable.



But through the lens of powerful Purity, this is "defilement." Mixing seen as evil. New creations seen as evil. Reconcilliation seen as evil. These absolutists, these purticans, they are blind to the true implications of Imago Dei; In the image of God, Man was created.



Man; a word that isn't an abstraction. The word man is earth, love, hate, and as coloured as the flowers growing in the gardens of Capetown. What a blending of life! Thus South Africa is seeking to reconcile this human combination. However, they are not revenging the violence put upon the coloureds or the blacks through war or more violence. They are not creating a new enemy abroad. The opposite of an evil king is not a different king. It is an entirely different governance altogether; maybe one we have never heard of.



Maybe soon so much of the ocean will leak out of that blind fist. And when nothing is left for it to hold on to, what will happen? Outside of the fist lovers are reunited, families restored under one roof; A father kneels in the dust and holds his daugther again.

A Coffee Heart, and the Plentitude of God

 Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

                               Pied Beauty

    Glory be to God for dappled things—
        For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
            For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
        Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
            And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

    All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
        Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
            With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change: 

                                                Práise hím.

Poetry is a Stubborn Art

The following is a quote from an Edward Hirsch essay. I love the way he teases meaning and connects dots, without forgetting a sense of empirical humaness. His interpretation and explanation of poetry is as clear as William Hazlitt. Mmm A True Critic; every century needs one. 

––––––––

"We live in a superficial, media-driven culture that often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feeling. Indeed, it seems as if our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. We want to divide it into recognizable stages so that grief can be labeled, tamed, and put behind us. But poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions. To grieve is to lament, to mourn, to let sorrow inhabit one's very being.

Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, "leaving poetry free to go its way in tears." Implicit in poetry is the notion that we are deepened by heartbreaks, that we are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish--to let others vanish--without leaving a verbal record. Poetry is a stubborn art. The poet is one who Will not be reconciled, who is determined to leave a trace in words, to transform oceanic depths of feeling into the faithful nuances of art."

––––––––

Tyler Mccabe, what do you think? 

Anyways, I'm sitting here in the library with two essays hanging over my shoulders. I hope and pray I will be able to summon the creativity needed to string a few words together in logical order. logic. My Greatest Struggle. Otherwise I will be packing up and moving out soon. This episode of Seattle is about to end. Up next is South Africa and Other Travels, if you didn't know. But what a year, am I right? My plants on my dresser are dead; I forgot to water them. But my mind is not. My heart is not. I am alive! I am alive with unsounded depths! 

Oh the power of an exclamation. 

The library is closing, they are flickering the lights, we've got to get out of here. 

I Squint to See Love

Snow happens softly in Oregon. 

We finally know what the cold rain looks like

when the white appears.

Solid.

But so soluble. 

It is a comfort to see the falling of the snow. 

Like so many desires

waking up and finding themselves suddenly tangible. 

Bleary-eyed but here;

present. 

A voice asking you to go on. 

Or the touch of a dreamed-up lover.

When I walk out in the snow

I am among the presence

of fully realized dreams. 

Squinting,

creasing my eyes; 

the only way to look up and see it all.

I am reminded of photographs in the family attic.

Within them all is a small child; a daughter.

In one she is sleeping; her head rests on the belly of a house cat.

In another she pouts with her arms crossed in mock adult-hood.

You get the picture. 

The daughter is the picture

until you squint your eyes.

Only then can you notice a constant companion, 

always a bow in her hair.

Colors combed in with exact precision.

Intentional softness.  

I am reminded of snow when I see her bows;

tangible evidence from the dreams of 

another.

Let the Rhythm of the Snoring Carry You Away

---------

There are surprising positive consequences inherent in being the eldest sister.

For example, I always get the place I want to sleep in the hotel room. Not counting the master bed if the parental units are present, of course. But a pull out trundle? Right side, two pillows. Only a couch? I'll take that. In a family of three sisters one girl is always ousted to the floor, and it is my job to make sure that she is never me. Call me cruel, but I don't need no treaty of Westphalia to practice sovereignty, yo.

Actually don't call me cruel. I've had rough day - insults are not desired here. Another philosophy in how to obtain the best sleeping arrangements is to have a reputation for being the "best sleeper." In other words, I do not kick, bite, steal covers, and/or snore.* Bailey, on the other hand, is violent. If she ever wants to be a pacifist, she will first have to confront her sleep-self. Don't be fooled by the cute button nose - underneath the facade is a dreaming round-house kick to your sleeping face. Coincidentally, she is sleeping next to me right now. Tonight does not promise to be too crazy, but do pray for me. Never let your guard down. Let the rhythm of her snores serve as your reminder. I think I will build a pillow wall for safety.

Maddie, luckily, is not a threat tonight. She was bumped to the couch. At this point a collective sigh of relief is released everywhere. You see, Maddie is a sort of "viscous koala sleeper." It's a real thing. First she takes your covers. Than she wraps her arms and legs around you. Then she sleep talks in your face the rest of the night. This may sound cute to you, but rest assured that I know better. A Posteriori.

Thus, maybe out of pity they allow me to sleep where I want. They are self-aware. They know their powers. Oh the collective force of sisterhood.

---------

In other news, my day has not been rough. That was simply rhetoric I used earlier to illicit pity from my readership. Forgive me for showing you the man behind the curtain, but I wanted to enlighten you a little on my weekend.

I'll make it short and sweet:

Beach.
Sun.
Oregon.
Family.
Coffee.

Notice that essay-composing is not among the list of features present during the weekend. Um. I'll fix that, I promise.

Good thing blog posts like this exist in 198 miles, or people might start to suspect that I have literary intentions.
... But you and I know better.

---------

* comparative to others in my life; They kick, bite, steal covers, and/or snore worse than I do.