the view from the c-store on april 22nd, 2009

i keep thinking about that girl, the 19-year-old who spent forty hours or more a week behind the counter at the corner gas station, the one whose gaze wandered every evening to the chain restaurant across the street and the sun that always set behind it.

i wonder what she worried about then. she had just started her first term at the community college, and she had three classes to juggle, homework assignments that were always due sooner than she could finish them. she thought a lot about the people in the cars that stopped at the intersection, the cashiers and sales-people from the nearby mall flocking to the highway, checking their reflections in the small visor mirrors that flashed strange morse codes her direction as they were flipped down to block the sun. she thought about the men in pressed suits who bought cigarettes and flicked their eyes over her before paying and rushing out, their gold bands flashing briefly as they pulled the door closed behind them. she thought about the mothers who left their children in carseats in sedans parked at the pump and stood inside in line to pay, stretching their necks every fifteen seconds and peering through the windowed wall to make sure they weren't gone.

she thought about herself, i'm sure. she worried, according to the moleskine of that time, that she didn't know who she was. she worried that moving in with l. in a couple of weeks was a bad idea and she  worried that everything she was doing was opposite of what she really wanted. she worried that she didn't know her mom, that their phone conversations were always stilted and brief, and she worried that her job, her friends, her choices were encasing her in plaster that would harden and never disappear.

she dreamed of adopting a mutt whom she would call ralph waldo, and she imagined loading a volkswagen rabbit with "the bare necessities" for a cross-country roadtrip: a guitar, a 35mm camera and film, a box of books, a tent and blankets, hiking boots, jeans and flannel, an axe for firewood and notebooks for writing. she dreamed that she would sell everything she owned so she wouldn't feel tied to any place other than her car, and then she would simply live.

two years later, i envy that girl, the one who dreamed without apology. what happened to her? who stifled her and put me in her place? i am terrified to dream, and when i do--however tentatively--i am embarrassed when i admit it. i work half as many hours as i did then, now at a more socially-approved cafe, and somehow i feel even less alive than i did then. the plaster that i worried about--did it set? or was it something else? was it breaking up with l. and then struggling to pay the rent myself for the remaining ten months of the lease? was it quitting smoking? was it going vegan? was it getting sasha and becoming a cat person? was it reading only textbooks for month after month, leaving my favorite books to gather as much dust as my picture frame of mom?

i don't know.
i don't know where she is, the other julie, and maybe--maybe i have this backwards. maybe i don't want her back--maybe the paralyzed, stunted julie i am now is just a necessary product of transitioning towards the right direction. maybe, now that i am moving towards my longest-lasting dreams (towards university! towards peace corps and ukraine! towards writing, and a lifetime of poverty!), i have to deal with unraveling the knots that had pulled me into myself since i failed art school and started working at the gas station. to undo knots, in my experience, sometimes you must briefly pull them tighter.

perhaps i must first experience one extreme (unbridled dreams for the future that have no connection to the present) and the other (a tense myopia, thinking only of the next two days) before i can learn to negotiate both and transform into a more functional version of myself. but fuck. i want to be more functional now--i want to plan for the future while completing tasks for tomorrow, to apply to colleges months in advance and have the essay that's due in a few days in my instructor's email inbox before class begins.

i'm just so, so tired.

a list of bests.

1. reading the truth about forever together out loud in the horse stables outside mission park.
2. playing hooky from church and setting up a barbie-scale ship (or hospital, or city) in the living room instead.
3. "running away" with 50cent cans of crush from the soda machine at church.
4. meeting adam at the barker swings and then having cappuccinos at denny's as soon as you approved him.
5. going to galaxy grind/ taco time/ the library after school and talking for hours.
6. staying up late at night telling each other survival/shipwreck/runaway stories.
7. playing in the abandoned fifth avenue greenhouse in the winter--it was a fort, a haunted house, a cabin.
8. straightening each others' hair and talking about our (my!) yahoo messenger lovers.
9. baking cookies together.. or rather, watching you bake cookies while i ate and talked.
10. driving to couer d'alene together after i got my license, and then driving back late in the evening and seeing spokane turn beautiful in the dark.
11. vegan cheesecake from the south hill restaurant, then dollar movies at the garland.
12. candlelit winter picnic at manito park with all the kids.
13. discovering portland together after the apartment became my own.
14. watching hastings movie rentals with you and sue in my room, on greg's big flatscreen monitor (and eating carrots and hummus, goldfish, and yoke's chocolate chip cookies).
15. reading romance novels in the sunroom when mom wasn't looking.
16.  watching definitely, maybe, eating donuts by the centennial trail, and celebrating life the last february i spent at home.
17. hitting up gas stations for hot cocoa or tea with you and sue and searching for adventures on late tuesday nights after choir practice was over.
18. camping together in the middle of winter at the lake with faulty locks, warm beer, and a fizzy fire--and incredible chili, which you made (of course).
19. watching you graduate--and then, so quickly afterward, watching (hardly helping) as you moved into your college dorm.

you have to understand, i love you. so much.
you were always my opposite--thoughtful where i was brash, considerate where i was selfish, kind and forgiving where i was mean and vengeful. you balanced me, somehow, and drained the poison out of me. i owe you.

xoxo forever, and happy 19th birthday. ♥

a letter!

anna, thank you for your letter--which i received this evening (night?), after an especially long day at school. it was perfectly timed, and your handwriting was comfort food for starving eyes. i love you.

i would only be lying a little bit if i told you that yes, school and work and "life in general" is going well. for the most part, it is--as much as can be expected, i suppose. i am still wading hip-deep in questions and looming decisions, and expectations (both my own and those of others), and the various intersections of these threads have been difficult to negotiate.

but, i am optimistic. i can do this--the term is halfway over, and i will survive. yes, i have been sprinting when i should have been doling out my miles at a marathon pace, and yes, this mistake is not easy to redeem. but really, what is life but the knotting and unraveling of various experiences, various decisions, various mistakes? the purpose behind it all is rarely (if ever) apparent, and for the time being, i will focus on the means of carrying out my personal exploration, rather than devoting my mental fuel on pinpointing the ends.

the hourglass

i've lost my grasp on time.. although i'm not quite certain i ever had it in the first place.
i feel like i barely exist, moving unevenly from sleep to shower, to school, to work, to homework, to sleep, to shower. i have to keep reminding myself that there is a purpose behind what i do, but it in the midst of this flatline existence, i've forgotten what it is.

this is what i dream for myself, to escape the gray of the present:
a camera with a full roll of film in a metropolitan park on a windy, fall day; a hot cup of tea shared with a friend on an outdoor patio of a corner cafe, our hats and scarves and coats and gloves muffling the bite of the cold; a ballet watched with a visiting sister, the quiet warmth of the theatre enveloping us as the scene below unfolds; a small apartment on an upper floor, the walls a pigeon gray, the crisp sheets of my bed white, the furniture sparse, and the only visible indulgence--books, in well-kept piles and on shelves;

a canvas as large as a door propped against a wall in a countryside studio, the spring air wafting in the sweet smell of young plants and damp earth through the window, the table spread with tubes of oils, mineral spirits, paintbrushes, and rags;

a university office where i piece together research and prepare upcoming lectures, where i play the role of an adult for the required hours, until i return home; the armchair where i rest, post- metropolitan apartment, in a home i share with someone who loves books and thinking as much as i do, who does most of the cooking and lets me read deep into the evening, the fireplace crackling, and the dog--or cat, maybe?--twitching as he sleeps; the table, perimetered with several close friends, wine and a fine but simple dinner laid out between us, and soft but unpretentious notes floating into the silences from the record player by the window;

outings with sisters to the coast, where we spend time together and alone, a few hours of writing dispersed among the full weekend of late and lazy breakfasts, afternoon outings, and midnight picnics around the bonfire, where beer and maybe wine unleash the flow of reckless conversations, laughter, and even singing, when a few of us pull out our guitars and start to play...

am i trying to mesh impossibly unlike fragments together into a life that can't exist? forgive me if i repeat the refrain that has been echoing for several long months now, but i don't know what i want for myself anymore.
how am i supposed to plan how to get there?

piecing it all together (or, why i blog)

if you are not anna, or sue, or a member of my direct family reading this blog, welcome.
i don't expect there to be more than three or four of you a year who accidentally stumble upon my page and skim it before moving on, but your fleeting presence raises some questions that i feel partially ready to address. i accept the challenge (although no one voiced it but myself) to--what? redeem? justify?--the space i occupy on the web.

this started as, and continues to be, the most important form of communication between anna and myself--we are two sisters divided by the distance between our respective cities and colleges, and we don't have the luxury of talking or skyping or texting each other as much as we would like--our free time rarely corresponds. so we blog. i speak only for myself, but this process consists mostly of recording significant (or mediocre) events or thoughts or ideas, and the social/political/academic commentaries found on most popular blogs rarely make their way here.

i'm okay with that--i understand that my words provide no measurable worth to the general global/internet community, and that this blog serves to help me more than any of my readers (perhaps including you, anna, although i'm not sure i can make that call). it is, as you might have noticed, an almost uninterrupted chronicle of all that is bad in my life--my worries and depressions and hopelessness--and it might be surprising, but this is the way i bring balance to my life.

i am, in most social circles (with my coworkers, customers, peers, instructors, and even friends) typically light-hearted and positive. my perspective on life is fairly optimistic--i like to give people and situations the benefit of doubt and i tend to expect things to turn out for the better, even when they appear quite hopeless in the moment. but like most (if not all) of us, i have my crushing doubts and paralyzing fears, and i need an outlet in order to function--i need to drain the negativity in the most effective way possible.

this is why i blog. the world that communicates with my physical self does not usually see the gloomy, messy side of me. this is not always true, of course; the more i know someone--or rather, the more comfortable i become with him or her--the more i project a more balanced image of my inner thoughts and feelings. but for the most part, i don't feel at ease sharing my troubles. i am fiercely--almost detrimentally--independent, and i work through my issues on my own as they come, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not.

it is through writing about recently-encountered obstacles and recent failures that i manage to purge the emotional refuse that gathers on the perimeters of mentally-demanding activities (i.e., choosing a transfer college or a future career). the fact that the contents of my posts might hold little value to all but a handful of readers does little to influence a change in my intentions or methods of blogging. i just do what i have to do, for myself more than for you.