My intro post went up this week:

“I’ve always had big plans for the future. Growing up, I’d always be looking impatiently ahead for the better time that I was sure was coming, the time in a year or so when I’d get a different (better) friend group or get a driver’s license or graduate high school or start college. When all of those things happened, though (plus a lot more), and I got older, I started to realize that life isn’t so much about the future, or about big chunks of time. Life is made up of now, of days.”

Read more at RE:NEW

How sudden the world is, how splendid, and how sad. I’m coming, I think, more fully to who I am, but part of this is realizing, as I face my own stripped-bare soul in the harsh light of growing up and facing difficulties, how limited I am – how broken. I do not walk through the world with a burning fire or a palpable strength. Rather I walk slowly through it cherishing the tiny flame of magic that still leaps, stubborn and individual, in my mind and heart. I am more afraid than I would have imagined – more helpless. But I see more clearly now. And part of that seeing is suspecting that there is a space, 3 years from now or 5, when I will be a complete person – when I will have molded and changed and pulled myself painfully out of the structures of enough shells and left them discarded that my being and personality will be, essentially, decided. For better or worse. In the meantime, I keep looking upward. A few more miles to Jericho.

Recovering from being extremely ill is a strange sensation.

It’s like being felled in a war, and then waking up to find that your body and your home and your affairs have gone into complete disarray without you, and you must rebuild and put everything back into order.

I feel human again for the first time in what feels like weeks, so am cleaning my apartment – throwing away all the discarded food I tried to eat and did not, the bags and wrappers, piling the dirty dishes in the sink, turning the table back into its usual collection of organized clutter, vacuuming, placing water beside my bed and removing all the other paraphernalia of thermometer and drugs and tissue that signal sickness. Clear-headed for the first time in days, and eating again.

It always brings me peace to clean. The area I’m surrounded by, the space I live in, is one of the few – very few and fragile – places I can control in this world, and I cherish that tiny bit of power, the small expression of individuality that comes with keeping order in this place and making it reflect, in everything from how the cereals and oatmeal are arranged to which pictures are on the wall, who I am.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
-Mark Twain

“It seemed unreasonable, unfair, that a woman so young and beautiful should be so exhausted. Of course, it was neither unreasonable nor unfair. Exhaustion pays no mind to age or beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods.”

-Haruki Murakami, Dance, Dance, Dance (1994)

Lordy day. What’s a girl gotta do to get a little attention? What a waste of eyeliner.

Granted, I can, and did, do my shower, hair, and make-up in 15 minutes flat – but when a girl puts in that extra effort, even if it only takes 15 minutes, she wants the guy to at least show up. Not to mention the lack of extra excitement the whole night through. Le sigh.

Listening to Lily Allen’s “Who’d Have Known” as I do on practically a weekly basis, curled up on the couch in my sweatshirt about to watch an episode of Dream High before embarking on MFA and internship research. Life.

The weather acted upon her strangely. She was unfocused and at ease, yet a lucid clarity of vision came to her so that when she spoke, her words came out with the unfiltered honesty of wisdom. The air floated in through the window with a hint of magic and sleepy adventure, and she felt herself instantly back at home. Long lazy vacation days in Madang, where the humidity wrapped everyone in a warm tupor and made one’s physical senses simultaneously more sensitive, so that sleeping and swimming and eating were more refreshing and everything had an indefinable tang like the salt in the air. The whirling of fans would forever take her back to this place, and a particular kind of heat – humid and sly – but never the bright scorching of summer – would make her feel as she had felt in the tropics.

Things done today:

DB article. Dramafever review. Mopping (kitchen floor). Cleaned out the refrigerator. Now off to dinner with the Ames and then back to watch the Doctor Who Christmas special with Adeline. Life is good. Even if I am slightly stressed about a hundred different things. Yet I know I’m super blessed with good friends.

There’s an art to living well. I’m trying to learn it.