Melt my Heart

I had the opposite of that moment I talked about the other day.  where everything felt right.  Instead, everything felt wrong.  I was walking through downtown Palo Alto which is a bizarre place.  It just seems to want so badly to not be  Palo Alto, but it is.  As a drunken man stumbled past me, I felt the seed of anxiety get planted somewhere deep in the pit of my stomach.  The opposite of awesome for me is anxious.  It is the worst emotion I can think of.
Anyways, I was almost back to my car, when a homeless man and I made eye contact.  Do you ever step on a grape when you're barefoot and halfway through you realize what you're doing, but at this point you can't help it and your doomed to have a smushed grape on your floor/foot?  Or you're driving sort of absent-mindedly and you realize the light is yellow, but you don't want to slam on your breaks so you go through, but as soon as your car has passed that threshold of the crosswalk line the light turns red and before you know it, you've broken the law?  As I made eye contact with this man, I realized I had somehow done wrong.  He looked into my eyes and he hated me.  I could have anticipated the words if I hadn't been hoping they wouldn't be said, but they came out of his mouth anyways, a loud, "F**k you."

1.  I think I look like a white trash Mom in this pic.  2.  This pic gets somewhat relevant, I promise. 

I spent Friday night babysitting, which is like paying me to eat cookies.  Literally, I was being paid to eat their food.  And watch their 3 1/2 year old little girl.  I'm not always the best with little girls, but in general little boys love me.  I just have more practice with them, I suppose. 
But we bonded, mostly over our knowledge of Disney princesses (girl was showing me up - she could differentiate between Flora Fauna and Merryweather from Sleeping Beauty) and our mutual enjoyment of dancing in the middle of living rooms to Vampire Weekend songs. 
An hour into it, she kept accidentally calling me Mama.  Which I suppose, meant she identified with me, liked my company, and saw me as an authority figure.  Two hours into it, she stopped playing, stared at me, and said, "I'm so glad to spend time with you."  It was very cute, and as one who does not spend much time in affectionate environments, it was sort of a surprise.  About three hours after she had met me, this little girl stopped again to tell me she loved me.  I hesitated for about half a second before I told her I loved her too. 


I am, in general, very stingy with giving my emotions out to others.  It takes me more than three hours to love someone, and much longer than that to tell them about it.  Negative emotions, which I am probably (wrongly) more liberal with, still take me a bit of time to develop.  I have never hated someone with one glance, which is probably a good thing, but I still think there's something to letting yourself feel.  I recently told me roommate that I had never cried over a boy.  She thought that was really weird.  Which I suppose it is.  I am more ready to give away my kisses than I am to give away my feelings. 
But in the moment, I realized that I love that little girl.  which says a lot to me about the ability of children to open hearts. 


I think I made all my points.  Gosh, I wish I were better at tying bows at the end of my posts, but I'm just going to leave you with that. 

Long Overdue

It's been a while, my friends.

And back, by popular demand(not), is a post where all the little strings of my thread in my brain come together - not to become some sort of fabric or item of clothing, but a giant ball of knots that only Maniac Magee himself could untangle (side note:  that book is still awesome, and you should reread it as an adult, unless you are a child in which case, i wasn't aware children read my blog.  actually I wasn't aware much of anyone read my blog.  except wonderful people.  if you are still reading at this point, i can say with 100% surety that you are a wonderful person).

Yesterday I walked home around 1:00 pm and just about everything about the walk wanted to be blogged.  But they were all different things.

There was the way that when you tilt your face towards the sun and there is a gentle breeze and life seems perfect that you can let the world be perfect in that moment.  There are a lot of moments like that in life, where you just feel good and everything feels right.  They are the tender mercies that I've heard about.

Also, right after that happened, this guy gave me this look like what the crack in the jack are you wearing slash I think you might be from outer space slash your hair looks nice.  1-2 of those things might not have been communicated in his look.  Then I realized that most of the time, I am a spectacle.  Coral pants and shirt that can only be described as ugly, but in a cool way and sunglasses.  then I realized that what is a spectacle without spectators.  And I gained new-found respect for you, my dear blogger-dom. 

I was thinking about the spectacle/spectator relationship as I found an empty classroom last night and danced in it with complete fear that someone would walk in on me for about half an hour.  Then I doodled on the chalkboard for another half hour.  It was largely productive and largely unproductive simultaneously.  I took a picture before I erased it all:

Betsy the elephant is probably the best friend I've had for the longest in my life.  We're going on like 8 years of best-friendship now.  That's pretty significant.  And sad.

Also, yesterday I dropped a class. My photography class.  Because going to that class feels a little bit like standing naked in front of the person you like's parents/the casting agent for skinny-model-agency/Adam Levine.  (Sorry, I was just watching the voice.)  Which is to say that just because I have no talent or experience in photography doesn't mean that you should completely disregard all of my work and make me feel like a waste of time.  It's not actually that bad, but it isn't exactly the supportive environment I had hoped for.

You know what they say about how to get to Carnegie Hall though?  Practice.  By which I mean, I am not giving up on photography, I am just giving up on that class.  But also, I mean, I have already sung in Carnegie Hall in my life.  This is not a joke, that actually happened.  This is a picture of me right around the time of that performance:

This photo could have been taken anywhere, but will you believe me when I say it was backstage in Carnegie Hall? Also, at least one of those girls looks really pretty.  And usually I ask permission before I post photos of my friends on my blog, because it's on the internet, but this picture is already on the internet, so I didn't ask.  Sorry Britt!  Love you!

This is now nearing that point where I've said most of the things that I can remember that I wanted to say and now there is not much more of a point to writing.  That's kind of the definition of my blog though.  

Yeah, man.

Dancing in the Moonlight

Well actually, sunlight.

One of my favorite pastimes, if I am in the mood for it, is to celebrate coming home with dance.  The people who live in my house are mostly gone during the day, and this quarter I find myself coming home really early - like 130.

And when it happens, I like to open all the blinds and put in my headphones and dance around the place in as weird a manner as I possibly can.  It does wonders for my outlook on the world.

In no particular order, the songs which best foster weird dancing.  Like you don't even know how weird I'm talking.

Tokyo by Imagine Dragons.  My dancing is weirder, I promise.

New In Town by Little Boots.  Warning, this video is weird and full of city gritty-ness.  If you watch it, you'll understand.

Rill Rill by Sleigh Bells - Seriously, I just wonder what your boyfriend thinks about your braces.

Tongue Tied by Grouplove I'm realizing that all of these music videos are weird because these are weird songs.  All the better to dance to, my dear.

All I Need by AWOLNATION.  This is not an official music video because such a video does not exist, but it's pretty good.


And there you have it folks, dance the afternoon away.

I Want a Perfect Body

And I want a perfect soul.

If you really love something, then you treat well, I think.  I've heard that somewhere at least.  It sounds true enough to me, anyways.  Let's for a moment, except this as truth.
I've been thinking about how I treat my body.  Not very well.  I must not love it.  I think I should love it.  It's a gift.  It allows me to do anything.  It allows me to feel, and touch is my favorite of the senses.
I torture it sometimes.

When I wake up in the morning, I pick out an outfit and go into the bathroom.  I take off every scrap of clothes that I wore to sleep and do a full evaluation.  I shudder at the fullness of my hips and  the lumps on my thighs.  I suck in my stomach and try to press it in with my hands.  I begin the process of putting on my clothes.  I contort and twist my body into fitting into whatever items I have picked out.  Sometimes I wear sausage-casing-esque "shapewear" in order to make the bulges look smoother.  They're fine at first, but after hours of wear, my body begs to be freed.

Once I'm dressed, I begin the process of plastering colors on my face.  Mascara, eyeliner, foundation, powder, bronzer, eye shadow, sometimes blush and lip gloss.  When I was 13 my dad noted that mascara was Spanish for mask.  I think about that sometimes.

I fill it with junk.  Or what's worse, I eat raw vegetables for about 8 hours until my withdrawal-shaken body lashes out and I then eat way too much of whatever it begs for.  Usually sugar.  Sometimes potatoes.  My body has weird cravings for potato products lately.  After I do that, I think about how weak I am.  I am filled with regret.  I drove my body to want this, but yet I look at it so disapprovingly.

This is not the peak of my body mistreatment.  In high school, hardly a day went by where I didn't skip meals.  Being hungry and then overly full seemed to be the regular.  And eating in front of people was always a struggle.  I went through a period of time where after binging, I would take laxatives in order to try and erase all the bad I just ate.  But then my body would just feel as sad as my mind did.

I don't always feed it so poorly.  But rarely do I let it move the way I should.  For most of my life exercising was admitting that my body was disgusting.  It was like saying - hey I am fat so I need to go to the gym.  Every invitation to do physical activity was perceived as a slight on my physical appearance.  And I grew to dislike it.  So, so much.

When people didn't like me, usually I blamed my body.  Let me clarify.  When boys didn't like me, I blamed my body.  I told myself that if I wore clothes that had a size with only one digit they would all like me.  That what separated me from the girls who had boys chasing them down was the number on the scale - and I hated my body all the more for it.  And that lead me to treat it worse.

At night, when I go to take a shower, I do a repeat of the morning's body check.  I stick out my belly to see how far it will go.  I get mad at my wrists and ankles and calves and shoulders and knees and thighs and cheeks for not having the decency to be small and feminine.

I'm not going to censor like I usually do and not post this.  Usually when I mention how I actually feel about my body, I am met with half-hearted attempts at telling me that I am actually beautiful and that I should own my body and that here's how I can be healthier and that my body is divine.  Sure, maybe all of those things are true.  But sometimes, its all I can do to not hate my body.  To simply just know that it is the way it is and not be mad at it.