alright alright, good turkey day, im stuffeedddd as usual, and i made a pretty bangin' turkey curry gravy that was gluten free, and an amazing cake and cupcake arrangement for kims bday, im gonna go ahead and give myself a pat on my cute little behind for that one. booked a flight for dfw today then off to shanghizzle. Im kinda nervous but equal parts excited. I hope things take off from here. I hope this is what i ought to. if anything, ill have some great writing emerge from it, i hope. I love being unstable, but its always nice to have friends and a room to come home to, i look forward to that. I look forward in general. Anways, hitting the gym tomorrow. Too much turkey and mimosa for one day, luckily lifetime is a beast and never closes. tomorrow = 5 miles. done and done.

jessy

so looks like im definatley going to shanghai for a while, until june. Ill be in texas for a couple days in january before i leave, then ciao! until june 1st. Now, funny story, the chinese government blocks the facebook, sooo...that means that i will be using this blog as my primary form of communicaiton along with emails. So if anybody would like to email me my new address on my facebook. Also ill i have my phone that i will have international sevice on, and theres always skype yee haw! Im excited but also a little nervous. When i get back in june, ive decided im going to use the money i saved and visit a few places before hopefully grad school. If anybody wants to spend june jetting around with me, id love a partner in crime.

some men make me feel weak in the knees. Javier Bardem is one of them.

that time i thought about going east

kinda cool, never thought id end up in china, but hey, i think i could do china, maybe. Im gonna need some warmer clothes either way. damn it.
fingers crossed.

That time we went west.

In the summer before I graduated college I went west. At a time when every chemical in every part of my body was right where it should be. A number of culminating circumstances brought me back to "the gang". The OLD gang, really. My three best friends from highshool and I set off for southern california, LA, though endless desert to meet our fourth best friend who was living and working there, lucky bastard. At least I thought so. I think I had an idea about LA that wasn't accurate prior to actually being there. Maybe I didnt give it a fair shake, but bottom line is i found the drive there much more interesting. The four of us, Armin, Gaynor, Nate, and myself departed roughly 3 pm central time, Dallas, TX due west.
What posessed us to do this? I guess i can only claim temporary insanity due to the heat, life long friendship, the need to escape heartache rooted in waco, and morbid curiosity of seeing if we could make it across lifeless highway in time for me to graduate. We had exaclty one week. We drove twenty six hours straight, not stopping, not even to eat, only to pee. There was a bag of banana chocolate chip muffins, clementines, and unsalted organic popcorn in the back. We took a candy apple red chrysler sebring. It was one of the best times of my life, and the strangest. We were all there for different reasons, in all really different places in life, not to mention were all jus incredibly different people to begin with. Bizzare is the only work i can think to describe it right now, but thats not sufficent. It was, nauseating and intrigueing at the same time. Like i'd imagine LSD would affect someone, or the way you feel when you have a fever, and you wake from a fever induced nightmare and that disorientation scares you. This trip was a way for me to explore, and a way for me to make peace with long gone issues i ever had with my old friends, a way for me to suppress my mounting anxiety about post grad, and a way to just say fuck it. Ive heard the best way to deal with your fears is to surround yourself with barrenness followed by wanton decadence. In case you didnt catch the sarcasm, I mean just the opposite. So its funny that this trip came at the time it did, with the people it did through the desert that it did, right into lala land. LA came and went, I went spent two or three whole days there, i cant remember which, it was such a daze. A daze i was happy to be a part of.
Like i said, the drive was the best. Nothing like a great american road trip to bring out deep seated issues in people. We were all stripped down into awkward silence. There was fighting, there was laughing, there was teeth brushing and gum smacking, deliriousness, and damn honest answers to personal questions. We came out of those 26 hours, 26 back knowing each other differently that we had before. Dallas, San Angelo, Alpine I wished, El paso, Santa Fe, Phoenix, Mojave maybe, Flagstaff maybe, Coast. Gas station, switch, gas station, switch, endlessness, gas station, cacti, gas station, drug wars, switch, sun, switch, pee, taco, 20 questions, gas station.
We saw windmills in west texas. I recalled the last time I was in car with these three on the way to the airport in atlanta. I rejoiced in the fact that i was deflowering this side of the country. Never had my body been past this point on the map, i couldn't wait to devour it. Every second i was covering more ground, i was making more progress. This is my moby dick i thought, and every other literary allegory that seems applicable.
I remember, midland, and the massive windmills, and feeling like don quixote. Slicing through uknown, uncut territory, the untread highay. Like a fresh cheesecake highway, or a new tub of butter, but linear and never ending.The car seems uncomfortable and ill fitting and somewhere around hour ten my inner turmoil subsides, and i sink into the leather, and the cage becomes my home. i break it in, like a good pair of shoes, like your footprints when you stand in the ebb and flow of the surf too long until you are burried.
I am Learning about you three, letting our ideas swim around in a small place, forcing us to interact profoundly.
I remember Staring into the night sky near alpine, and the beauty i couldn't see because the sun would not illuminate it for me. It was incredibly frustrating. If we had only been there an hour earlier, maybe on the way back i thought. Wait, I know, I'll press my forehead to the glass pane. Ill force my face through the darkness, I let my night vision adjust by staring and concentrating, and giving myself a headache. I can see everything. I can see through the earth, I can even see the turbines now, they blink red at night for the pilots. I feel like Don Quixote.
We broke down in New Mexico, and i started to worry maybe i really wouldn't make it to graduation. How would i explain this to my parents who thought i was in texas, and expected to meet me there in a day? Sidewalk, books, word games, heat, mechanics, heat, 300 dollars, heat, oil change, heat, heat, heat, heat the engine turns over.
It starts raining.
We drive. Water, we drive, darkness, we drive, sheets, still, we drive. ETA 2 am.
Theres water, theres laughter, theres music, theres the beach boys, over and over again theres the beach boys. Theres laughter, theres water, water, water, water. Lights.
There are police lights.
My head turns, my eyes adjust at the same moment that two women drenched and barefoot from the rain come into focus in the left two lanes of this four lane highway, so does the still dark horizontal outline of a human about 20 feet from a demolished car on the cement guardrail. It obvious these women are distraught, its obvious the police car has just arrived. Its understood in a split second, we have witness something profound.
Everything goes silent and slow motioned in sync with the turning of my head as my jaw rubber necks so far behind left shoulder i think it may pop out of place, but i wouldn't have noticed if it did. Time stopping, that is the closest thing to time stopping that I will ever experience. My mind is blank and void, only fixed and frozen. I snap out of what seemed like 5 minutes but was really only about half a second to sudden jerking of the vehicle. Nathan swerves to avoid hitting the body. "Holy shit that was a dead body!" armin shouts almost reflexively. We all react different. Nathan contemplates going back, Gaynor gets angry at the absence of somberness, Armin is in disbelief and awe. I am sick to my stomach. We decide to drive on, deciding there is nothing we can do to help even if we do go back, the cops are already there. And none of us have any medical resources, or the frame of mind to use them.
We all encounter death and the idea of our own mortality as it pertains to one another.
We all secretly realize that the accident was so recent, There wasn't much from keeping that car from being us.
We are silent.
No one knows what to say.
We each work out internally our own confrontation with death.
We discuss how perhaps the body was alive, insisting that there is a chance to make each other feel better, we all know we are lying.
Nathan awkwardly digresses the discomfort in the car with a factoid about how Jeff Buckley once witnessed and accident involving multiple deaths of illegal immigrants on a highway and how it affected him the rest of his life.
We drive on, cautiously.
Gaynor pops a Valium, he just had oral surgery and has been taking them periodically throughout the trip for pain.
I tell myself the last one wasn't medicinal.
We drive.
I think, Everyone is so afraid of death. I'm not afraid of death, I'm only afraid of not living. Ive got two hands, two eyes, two feet, a decent brain, a deep desire, i need to live.

There was something very defining in that car about life, about your twenties and about discovery.
Dallas 3 am, we pass out on various couches.
I made it to graduation.
We never talked about the body again.

dont try to fix it

Im always tryin 'ta fix everything that comes my way.
Always tryin' to tend to every bodily need and spiritual satisfaction, in constant pursuit of perfection and comfortability in mind, body, soul.
Elizabeth gilbert wrote this passage in eat pray love in which she describes a medetation in her study of yoga. She explains how mosquitoes are biting her and she has every urge to itch it but she doesnt, forcing herself to realize she neednt cater to each and every discomfort.
Mr. Prox thinks its okay to be hungry, and I agree. Its okay to be uncomfortable, its actually kind of freeing to realize it. It feels good to just say, hey, i feel like shit today, im scared, im depressed. It makes it easier to laugh about, which makes it easier to solve, which doesnt breed repetition.
Okay so ill go ahead and say it then and then be okay with it.
I dont know what i want, except to learn, and to have good friends.
And my parents age scares me, the thought of it has always scared me, and its settling in now into a reality. I dont want to see them get old but i know i have to. Its very unsetting, and i know, that someday, I will have to get old too. I hope it works out okay for me. I dont like the thought of being more competant than my parents. Its sort of makes me appreciate them more right now, i mean, they drive me up the fucking wall and we have almost nothng in common, and they have personality flaws and i have sensitivities, but really, so does everybody. Aint nobody special enough to claim they wont let you down, what more, grind your last nerve. But anways, were all we got, and im okay with that. I could have it alot worse. I pretty much like who i am, and Im really lucky although i feel down lately. And although i cringe to admit it, i have fun with my parents sometimes. Maybe I was meant to spend this time with them. Maybe ill be grateful for it someday.

a day.

Im lucky because my toes stagger up from underneath the bathwater.
Im lucky because i'm taking a bath even though i don't need to be cleaned.
Im lucky because my inner ears go numb when submerged, like a corridor in a ancient church, i expect to hear a derge somewhere deep in the vacuum.
Im happy to sense artificial aromas, although plastic, and and essentially vapid, they simulate moroccan atmosphere, im lucky because i imagine it, and i am lucky enough to imagine the possibility of actually experiencing it with some whiff of reality.
Im lucky because my phone rings while im bathing, Im lucky when it doesn't as well.
Its easy to be alone, and I'm lucky im content that way.
Im happy to be reading, and to have read, and to be able to read.
Im lucky because I'm aware of all three.
Im better off because I say what I want, Im lucky because I dont always get it, I'm sad because I dont always know what it is.
Lucky that im waterproof, my skin swallows me whole, without it I could disassemble under pressure easily, sopp up the water and be weighted, left to disentigrate.
Lucky that I have a day to reflect on.
Its lucky i have more than one instrument to play.
Luckily, a piano is a mammoth of an instrument, Im reluctant to approach it. Misinterpreted, it is the most inviting of all the instruments. She lays it all out on the table, twelve note scales at a time, frenquencies, for dummies. Simple and classic, static but surprisingly organic. Hitting an A minor, this is the gentle giant I'm convinced. You're so ridiculous, with your big, dark, commanding core and you're huge open mouth that talks a big game and your 88 teeth sparkly like a great white in hunt. Why, thats nothing but a smile. You're nothing but an artist. You're frankensteins monster. Never asking to be created but magnificent none the less. I'll bet you've never even taken a bite. Here, let me lull you. Its such a shame and a paradox but it seems that everything scary is the result of a miscommunication. We really only fear what we dont understand. What a tragedy, what a magnificent tragedy. I'll play you a lullaby, first with my left, then with my right because it will ease you in, then with both, mano a mano, now its just a movement. Now im just stroking your hair, and leading my finger in circles on your skin, now im just showin off. I wouldnt go so far to admit it, but you, mezzo forte fortissimo piano, are fast becoming my favorite lover. Lucky i can say that.

i know this probably sounds cheesetastic, like an ad for a school or something, but i seriously, honestly, deeply am DELIGHTED at the differences in people. I was just planning on going to shanghai which i might, dependant on the next few weeks, and i was looking at images of the shanghai tower, and words that look more like pictures to me than symbols, at the same time that i was watching the country music awards. Diversity and Biodiverstiy is extraordinary, god i love i love it ilove it !!! people are so interesting. I guess thats why i got so mad when my parents got worried about me living in china, which is stupid, one, becuase im old enough to not need their permission, and two...it makes me angry! they say they are scared of china, what does that mean? scared of china? they dont know anything about china, that is whats scary, not knowing. And whats scarier is that people dont care to confront what they dont know, its depressing, it makes me feel less optimistic about humans, people should seek out what they dont understand. please seek out what youre afraid of, one-way mentalities are scary, are sad.

i got to thinking..

how strangely long it has been since anyone has touched me, and i dont mean in a pervy way either. I mean really, like deliberately hugged or embraced, contact other than accidental. Babies die if they arent touched, it think its unhealthy for adults as well. I mean its so taboo now, its weird, i mean we cant touch men becuase they think it means somethign and we cant touch women because its freaks them out and i cant touch family because its awkward and uncomfortalbe and im left sitting around wishing i had someone to cuddle, adn realy, just cuddle, thats all. Human touch is importat i think, its as necessary as drinking water, gettting sunlight, eating your vegetables. The next time someone hugs me, im not letting go for a while. Yeesh, i need to get out of here soon.

Its never going to rain again.

sometimes i wonder if i'm sabotaging myself by running away from everything good that comes my way, or if im just being smart. I really dont know, either way im a little restless, and my brain is acting weird, and i wish there some arms to find comfort in near by.

I cant get it out! It wont materialize! this feeling, this lost feeling. Its expressive and good but its bothersome and restricting because it wont show itself! show yourself! show yourself! I feel as though something or someone has died. Someone i was expecting, like a long drawn out illness, i knew would effect me but was blinded to the reality of it. Im mad and i dont know at what! Im sad beyond having energy to express sadness and I think i know why. Its an ache for the life i had that i know i will never have again, and dull churn in my belly that doesnt know where its going. That same loop that taunts me and tricks me telling me that i will never know, that life wont budge, that now since i have known pure and simple happiness i will never again experience it on the same terms. All your magic has run out! Youve used up all the good and amazing that one life is alotted! Magic, I wish i could get a little magic. Something's gotta give.

sometimes i get overwhelmed by the pressure to be great. But ive been doing this thing lately that puts everything in really good perspective and suddenly it feels alot better. Everything is just an opportunity, nothing i do really means anything in particular. Life is supposed to be enjoyed not dealt with. When i think of life in its most basic form, survival and longevity, the earth as a planet and an entity rather than how i know it so up close, as an axiom, then everything seems much more simple and it easier for me to just create. The sun will set and rise, the earth will rotate, things and people will live and die, and i will always have times of happiness and sadness. There is nothing scary about cycles, they promise the start of a new beginning in exchange for a small changing period. Besides, times of turmoil are the best for creating anyways, and i can wait.

"were all here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is" - kurt vonnegut

My mind is completely adrift, lingering upon the ever passing moment. Nothing seems to saturate me. I wish to be drenched, and yet, I long for the outdoors, I long for flight, I seem to plead for uselessness and still sit and am divided. My cider sits, as a weak attempt to center myself, and it steams quietly mocking me. I wish to steam, I wish to be concentrated, I wish to have passion like a heat filling and brimming inside me until it can no longer be contained, but am condensed upon the paper as a steam to the ceiling. If only I could dictate the nature of the steam. How we all wish we could dictate the nature of spontaneity

summer

The emptiness in that apartment could not equal the emptiness inside me. The ache was dull and hard to characterize, sort of like it wanted to be heard but didn't want to ask for it. It was clamy and creepy, but perfect. So perfect that I could not have planned it better myself. History, height, him, there was no better combination. Something about the summer, it makes me feel so alive, so alive that i might burst into song and lyrical movement at any given moment, like glossolalia. Im certainly more productive in the summer, healthier, happier. Everything happened for me, and everything always does. Im not in love with anyone, i gave myself to a bigger cause a long time ago. Im devoted to the summer, and everything it encases, this natural ecological and social phenomenon that i cant get enough of. The fall is fantastic enough to distract me from the fact that its gone, but soon winter is here, and my life is happy from day to day, but winter is about getting through it, spring is about anticipation, and the summer is my rebirth. The summer is about holding on to it and using it so well that it wears you down to a shallow breathing gasp of a halt that sputters across the finish line of august and is disillusioned in september, like a shoe with holes in it, and old soft leather jackets that no long squeak, hanging on by a threat, like nails bit down to the quick. Maybe i was born in the spring because i knew if i arrived any later i would not be aware enough to know june. I ache for both the intense joy of and the loss of it every year. Magic not mysterious, concrete not concreted, an avocado just ripe enough, supple beach skin, stringy hair, salty noses. My life is in constant pursuit of one fourth of it.

my biggest fear is that i will never know freedom again like I did this last summer. I wish i could write something breif to describe how the summer, but specifically this past summer made me feel. Ive never felt more alive in my life. I hope i have the joy of ever feeling that way again. Maybe its just the summer, maybe it really was just the heat and it got to me, im not sure. Maybe ill write something about it later..