Yoga Class

December 3, 2014

I’m letting the gentle melody of the Braveheart soundtrack Pandora station rock my metaphysical senses in gentle meditation as I lie on a mat of foam that reeks of the lemon ginger scent of Trader Joe’s organic cleaning spray. Let the stress of the day roll off of your shoulders like the ocean breeze in the evening after a sweltering day. Breathe in, breathe out. I listen to the flamboyant voice of my gay male yoga instructor, muffled by the presence of bright blue braces on his teeth that reflect the glow of the candle-lit room every time he smiles.  And by candles, I mean the battery powered pieces of translucent plastic with tiny light bulbs in them. It’s a realm of organic peace that I’m lying in right now. Seriously.

       Clear my mind. That’s what you’re supposed to do in yoga. But all I can focus on is how my muscles are shaking like an epileptic in an earthquake while I’m splayed out like Patrick Star balancing my bodyweight on my wrist with my other arm reaching up to the ceiling. Nothing like the humility of yoga.

I also didn’t get the yoga pants memo. I didn’t realize people actually wear them for yoga. My white legs in my running shorts are positively blinding.

Breathe in, breathe out. Release the stress. Become one with yourself. Don’t fart. God, don’t fart. Someone farts. I’m probably more embarrassed for him than he is for himself. Try to rub the foamy mat to reproduce farting noise so that he can reassure his fellow yoga peers that the wet rumble emitted from his hind area was really his sweaty palm wiping the rubber mat. All of us try to believe it.

“Let’s all breathe out an ‘om,’” my instructor beckons. We all sit in a circle with our shoulders back. I peek through my closed eyelids and see everyone with their legs crossed like Buddha. I try to look like I’m comfortable in that position. Then I hear the beginning of a gentle cadence of bass tones exuding from the mouths of the people around me like monks in a monastery as they harmonize their “Oms”, and these people are really getting into it, like they’re breathing out a demon or something, and you can smell the putrid air of “Om,” and I fight my church giggles because I’m sorry, it just amuses me.

I haven’t been back to yoga. Not my thing. 

December 2, 2014

              Be me. Late for my second flight from my layover in Dallas back to Seattle. Run onto the plane ten minutes before take-off. Breathlessly situate myself in my aisle seat. Silent prayer of thanks for aisle seat. Excessively affectionate couple to my left, aisle to my right. Prepare myself for four hours of silent solitude back to my city. Perfection.

              Begin to journal. I really like my handwriting. I’m engrossed in my own superfluous story-telling to myself, settling into the final leg of my journey home from Thanksgiving in Maryland. Just waiting on the stewardess to bring the drinks.

              Quiet Asian voice breaks my perfect introvert solitude like a small fly on the corner of a TV screen. Did I hear something? Notice a small old Asian man leaning into the aisle looking at my journal. “Are you writing an essay?” he repeats. Politely tell him that I am just journaling, and I return to my silent scripture. He did not take the hint. “I write essays in college. My daughter writes essays too. She’s in high school.” I very quickly realize his question was only an excuse to start talking.

              And talk he did. In his quiet Asian voice that all but disappeared in the drone of the airplane, he talked for four hours without pausing, needing nothing from me except eye contact and the occasional smiling nod. At first I wallowed in self-pity and regret that I could not turtle-shell myself into introversion for the next four hours, and I wondered how on earth I could extricate myself from the undying monologue, but then I realized that this kind Asian man with his Chinese accent and a voice like gentle rippling water truly was Buddha reincarnated, and after about ten minutes of god-like wisdom infused with the most random assortment of stories from his time as a Master of Arms in the Navy and a juvenile corrections officer, I was holding onto every word he said like it was the words of Jesus Christ himself. After twenty minutes of his speech, I shamelessly took out my notebook and began to take notes, much to his delight.

              The following lines of brilliance are the sum total of four hours of ceaseless monologue from a kind old Chinese man who deserves to have his wisdom shared. So share it I shall.

“I am the biggest racist there is. I really am. Against the human race. Humans are corrupt.”

“What you expose yourself to is what you will give back to the world. Garbage in, garbage out.”

“In the navy, my drill sergeant told me to empty my pockets. I didn’t empty my pockets. He asked me why. I told him I took it to mean that I need to empty my proverbial pockets of bias. Bias closes your mind to understanding. Empty your pockets.”

“Your behavior is indicative of where you’re headed.”

[Taking my notebook, he wrote the following]: “As forward-deployed military personnel, you should act and reflect honor upon yourself, your unit or command, and represent the United States as a diplomat.”

“No bullshit – I love to iron.”

“I work with at-risk juveniles. You must make juveniles feel that the society wants them.”

“We don’t want to create more enemies than we have. If you take a suspected terrorist and throw him in jail and treat him like a terrorist, and then one day you find out he is not a terrorist and you set him free, have you created a friend or an enemy? We must treat at-risk youth not like they are criminals, but like respectable citizens, and that’s who they will become.”

“Hope is the only thing to combat despair.”

“What is the one word that does not exist in the American dictionary?” He paused for a moment, and I shrugged my shoulders. “Impossible.”

“Nowadays, marriage is just a piece of paper. Criminality starts at home, when there is no home, and in the family, when there is no family.”

“Eyeliner is intriguing on a woman.”

“My wife will always occupy one of my heart chambers.”

On gay marriage: “Do you want another to dictate to you the parameters of whom you are supposed to love?”

“Societal equilibrium is the prevention of crimes. Is it a crime for a man to love a man?”

“The most dangerous people are Roman Catholics right after they leave the church parking lot.”

“You’re more than naked when you’re pissed off. You’re disemboweled, and the person that sees you angry has the power to push your buttons and be the little insect you can’t scratch.”

“If you really want the president to succeed for the nation, help him. Don’t tear him down. That’s un-American.”

“Good leadership is a product of good followership.”

“One must have a good set of global lenses in order to have a better understanding of what clicks with an individual to bring about their best qualities.”

“I used to be a hippie with long hair in a rock band. I really was.”

“You might laugh at a foreigner’s accent, but they might have the brightest ideas.”

“Early is on time, on time is late, but late is forgivable because parking is horrendous.”

“Dream of small attainable dreams that will be stepping stones to your bigger dream.”

November 23, 2014

              I’m telling you, growing up is no walk in the damn park.

              I’m going to share an excerpt from something I wrote in the minutes just after purchasing my plane ticket to Seattle. I had just hung up with the guy who owned the film crew I met in Ecuador. In the back of a canoe in the middle of the rainforest, he had offered me a paid internship to learn video production in Seattle. I’ve never had any real experience in production. I was about to sign 8 years of my life away to the Army Guard. I had no idea where I was going with my life. But I get this offer and I can’t say no. That offer was more than a job or a next step: it was someone who believed in what I am capable of, and was willing to make the effort and take the risk to push me to my potential. When you meet someone like that, don’t let them go. So we’re on the phone, home from Ecuador, and I’m asking him the logistics of moving out to Seattle. “We have an office with a microwave and a couch,” he explained. “We can try and get you a gym membership so you have a place to shower, and we’ll pay you for your first project so you have enough money to get started.” I’m smiling at the reality of this situation. “That’s all we can guarantee. It won’t be easy, but something tells me you can handle that.” Hell yes I can handle that.

“If I’m going to pack up everything I have and move 3,000 miles away, I only need guaranteed security and guaranteed money to get me started,” I tell him.

“I can guarantee those things,” he says firmly. And with that, he gives me his credit card information so I can book the ticket.

“Is this what trust is?” I ask, shocked that he freely gave me such sensitive information already.

He responded: “If not now, then when?”

So I booked the ticket. I’d been home from Ecuador for 3 days. I booked the ticket for the following week.

I’ll never forget the feeling I had in that moment.

“August 19, 2014

Remember this moment. Remember the moment where you took a chance. You saw a brilliant shining light on the horizon, and you gathered your things, said your good-byes, and you stepped out in pursuit of it. It shone vaguely and glimmered so dramatically there were times when it was all but gone. But it shone, and you followed.

You just booked your ticket. Tomorrow, you will clean out the bedroom at your parents’ house. Next week, you will pack all of your belongings into a suitcase, and in eight days, you will hop on a one-way flight to the west coast to pursue the shining light on the horizon. You will sleep in an office, shower at a gym, and eat at the tables of the people who care about you.

And you will shine. If you didn’t believe that, you wouldn’t be writing this right now.

And even if you don’t believe it, there’s no going back now.”

              I’m being all reflective because tomorrow I go home for Thanksgiving. It will be my first time home since moving here, and even though it’s only been 3 months, I’ve grown and learned and changed so much that it will feel like it has been much longer. And in honor of Thanksgiving, I’m grateful. I’m grateful to God for giving me the opportunity to achieve my dreams, and to my bosses for seeing potential in me and making sacrifices on their end to help me attain it, and to my parents for their sacrifice and ceaseless support, and to my sister and my friends who have remained connected to me even though we are thousands of miles away. I couldn’t have done it without any of them.

              And yes, I’m listening to the Gladiator soundtrack, so please excuse all these sentiments. Got me in my Honey Nut Feelios. 

VIDEO: Mommy Diaries Part 1

VIDEO: Mommy Diaries Part 1

VIDEO: Mommy Diaries Part 2: Apartment Edition

November 3, 2014

            I have my own apartment now. It’s a terrible place with carpet stains, a view of barbed wire, kitchen cabinets off their hinges, and a faucet that drips a drip that is so constant it’s more like a stream of water, but the place is perfect in every way because it’s mine, and I love it. It’s quirky too. It has a one-butt kitchen so small that it should be in an RV. I like to think of it as adorable. And, we have a hallway. It sounds absurd, I know, but think about it. A house has hallways. A one-bedroom apartment, at least out here, doesn’t. It has a living room with doors off of it. When my new roomie Lauren and I opened the wooden door while touring the place and stepped onto the fluffy light blue 1960’s carpet, we stood in the hallway and mentally cancelled all of the other apartment tours that we had left on the agenda. We were home. We were standing in a hallway, and it felt like a home.

            Fast forward a week and I’m locked out of Jordan’s apartment, so I beg the landlord to let me move into my new apartment early. He complies, hallelujah. Lauren drives her beat-up Honda to Jordan’s apartment to pick me up. It’s loaded full with her stuff, and we make some space in the trunk for every single possession I have to call my own. It seems hopeless – I’ll admit my pessimism for the undertaking. This light blue Honda Accord that she got for $100 because the entire passenger side is T-boned in such a way that you can’t open the passenger door adds to the raw, uncut adventure that we’re having in the city of our dreams. I haven’t touched my clothes that are strewn across Jordan’s living room furniture, so I run in and throw them in some trash bags, grab my guitar, and we peace out. Can’t get a hold of the apartment manager, so there we are on the street corner with all of our possessions jammed in this piece of junk with wheels, sitting on her trunk smoking her E-cig, with nowhere to go. We grab some dude on the sidewalk and ask him to take a picture of us in this moment of uninhibited liberty and excessive idealism.

Can't you just smell the adolescent idealism?

            When we finally move in, it takes us about 10 minutes to unload our stuff. The apartment manager comes in and takes us through the place. His name’s Andrew. He strikes me as some washed-up ex-rock band guitarist who hasn’t come to terms with the fact that he’s pushing forty so he lives alone in an apartment building that he manages with his two senile pugs while binge-watching Seinfeld. “Call me anytime, day or night,” he reassures us, even though it’s become clear that it’d be easier to get a hold of Obama than to reach Andrew when we need him most. The three of us awkwardly sit in a circle on our stained light blue carpet and sign the lease. A whole year in one apartment. Cheapest rent in the area, though, that’s for sure. Probably because of the shitty carpet.

            We salvage some semblance of civilization by stacking up my vintage suitcases in the corner and then stacking my books on top of them next to a cool lamp. It’s the only thing remotely close to furniture we have in the whole place. Lauren and I sleep next to it on this paper thin matt that eats my vertebrae every night I sleep on it, but after 3 months in a tent and 2 months on a couch, I’m not complaining. And there’s no Wifi. It takes more self-discipline than I’m willing to admit to restrain myself from depleting my cell phone data plan streaming “Orange is the New Black” from my phone. Instead I just play a lot of guitar and read my latest author obsession, Kurt Vonnegut. Everyone should read Man Without A Country. Just read it.

            It’s an adventure. All of it. I just signed a one year lease, and I have no income at all right now. My internship ended and now I’m a free-lance video person. I’m meeting with the right people and I have some side jobs tutoring, so I’m not an entirely useless member of society, but it’s scary. Since starting this blog and posting on Facebook, I’ve gotten some messages from people that say what I’m doing is awesome, how life is so exciting, I’m living the dream or whatever, and I am. It’s awesome, and I love it. But don’t get me wrong – there’s a price to pay for this kind of life, and that price is security. I don’t know where my next paycheck will come from, but I know I’ll have a bill to pay in a month.

            I had a meeting the other day with a big name in the industry, a guy who introduced Bill Gates to Bono and inspired James Cameron to produce Avatar. We met over coffee to discuss where I could go from here in my career, and he gave me some really good advice that I’m taking with me: Jump, and then the net will come to catch you.

            So against all the logic I learned in college, I’m just… jumping.

Saturday, October 25, 2014

          Last night, I became an adult.

         I sat alone last night at my bar hangout and wrote a screenplay. I love this bar. It’s a micro-brewery with the best craft beer around. I’ve been on every Tinder date there, seated at the wooden counter under the dim lights. The bartenders probably think I’m a prostitute. I’m there so often that Rick, the owner, knows to simply surprise me with a drink. Don’t even have to order. I sound like an alcoholic. I’m not.

         Anyway, my mad scientist boss calls me into his office last week and melodramatically announces that he has a job for me that he thinks might be asking too much of me, but he feels that I may be competent enough as a writer to help him out. He needs me to write episode 2 of the web show we plan to produce. This show’s been in the works for weeks, and everyone here is on board. It’s a show about…marijuana. Of which I knew nothing until I came out here two months ago. For ten minutes he walks me through his vision for the show, which I’ve heard a million and one times having attended the meetings, then he walks me through a screenplay template, then he gives me a plot synopsis that he has in mind for the episode (a very basic plotline), and then he asks me to develop an ~18 scene, 25 minute screenplay for it. I still don’t know why he asked me, but he did. Fortunately all the dialogue will be developed later, so really I only have to write a simple breakdown of scenes and characters. Easy, right? No. The creative genius and the boss I have to live up to are two magnanimous shadows of nail-biting pressure.

         So I sit on the task for like two days writing absolutely nothing and glowering indignantly at a blank computer screen that glowers back with its cruel, blank stare that makes me feel like a completely incompetent human being. Boss wants it ASAP though. That means sitting on it for two days is not a good idea. But he says nothing of it when he sees me, although we both know neither one of us has forgotten the task that has been assigned and, so far, unfulfilled. Finally, yesterday morning I promise to have it to him that evening.

         Nine o’clock rolls around. I haven’t written anything. I get back from the gym and it’s dark out, the steady Seattle rain falling, bringing with it the cold autumn weather that has been held off for the past month. Pressure’s on. It feels like college again and the many all-nighters I pulled to finish a paper on time. I need to write. I need to drink. Choices. So many choices.

         And this is the moment where I reached adulthood, dear reader. This is when I became an adult.

         I take my notebook and the show’s Bible (the book of characters, plotlines, etc.), and I go to my bar hangout. And on a Friday night, I sit in the corner of said bar, and I work. In a bar. On a Friday night. I remember in college what a Friday night at a bar meant, and I laugh dryly in my mind. The owner of the bar gives me free beer and I bury myself in the task at hand, politely excusing myself from conversations with the men who curiously approach my corner table. The hours pass, and this motherf***ing screenplay gets written. And as I drink more I actually laugh a little bit at my comedic creative genius which probably isn’t that funny, but I wouldn’t know because I haven’t had the guts to read what I wrote since I sent it off to my boss at 1am last night.

         So that’s how I became an adult.

October 13, 2014

The terrain

              The roads are winding and winding and I’m sure that they will never end, and the changing red, orange, and brown leaves, still drenched with summer’s green, blur into a 1960’s burgundy tie-dye outside my window, and I want to close my eyes and sleep but our destination could be right around the next corner, so instead I settle into a conscious daze, rattled to alertness only by the chasmic potholes that shake the car like landmines. We don’t know where we are or where we’re going, but we’ve driven for miles along this mountain path, the sounds of gravel crunching under the tires our steady lullaby, and it’s four hours until the sun sets and we have an eight mile hike up to a 3,300 foot elevation ahead of us, and we need to hurry up and find the trail head or else we’ll be hiking most of it in the dark, because there’s no way we’re going to turn around. Erica will get us a map, says a jovial fellow beckoning to his female passenger and her stack of laminated maps. He’s driving his big white creeper van down the mountain, the first sign of humanity we’ve seen in over an hour, and we flag him down like desperate survivors. Nope, the map says we need to turn around, but we’ll get there.

The first view of
a snow-capped mountain

              And then the gravel road opens up to a parking lot and we begin our trek to a lake at the top of the mountain. It must be something of a magical lake to be up so high and sought by so many. I like to believe it is, but then I forget about all that because it. Is. So. Steep. Jordan the Energizer Bunny marches ahead, leaving Megan and me panting and weak-kneed to continue the journey alone. As we walk up the mountain, everyone is walking down it, most of them minding his or her own business, until we begin to get desperate and ask every single hiker how much further up the mountain is the lake. We’re nursing beer hangovers and have about half a water bottle each, and about two miles up we realize that’s a really stupid amount of water to bring. Hours pass and we sip the water like it’s expensive wine, and the air gets thinner so our breathing gets heavier, and there are less and less people, and damn it’s getting cold. The foliage is thinning, which is really a beautiful thing because we can look out beyond the tree line to the gigantic valleys and snow-capped mountains in the distance, but it's freezing and we can smell ice in the air, and our water bottles our empty and it's starting to rain. So this is how we go, then. The last moments of our life on a mountaintop dying of hangovers and dehydration. I see Megan holding moss over her mouth and I think we have hit the point of delirium you see in movies. She saw it on a nature show, she said, where you squeeze the moss and water runs out of it.

Where we stopped for the water

              And then we hear the trickling of water, and there’s a small hill of rocks with water running between them, like a little mountain spring. “It’s our youth spring!” Megan shouts with childlike elation. “Or what do you call them? Fountains of youth!” The taste of that ice cold water is life-giving. Oh man it tastes so good. We try not to think about the potential Ebola or some exotic disease like it that we could be contracting as we guzzle abundantly, and instead I notice the silence, and I wish I could bottle up the silence and take it with me to the city. The clouds are sneezing on us, and it’s getting dark, so we keep moving, walking through mountain meadows and past small bogs, our horizon painted by the snow-capped Cascades. After seeing no human being for a considerable time, Jordan takes the momentous opportunity to jump out from behind a tree where he had been waiting for us, and I do believe our screams are probably still echoing through the mountain canyons and valleys. We finally reach the lake, and we’re there just long enough to take a few pictures and eat a peanut butter sandwich, and then we hit the trail again, with four miles of straight downhill and long hours of silence and darkness ahead.

The lake... worth it.

              We make it about a mile before needing to break out the flashlights. In the darkness, time fades to nothingness and it strikes me that I’ve read about that happening in books, where an hour could be twenty minutes or twenty minutes could be an hour, but I never really experienced it until this moment, where the three of us form a line down the mountain and say nothing, alone to our own thoughts, focusing only on the roots and rocks at our feet, the only interruption the occasional slip down the muddy slope or a stumble on the spidery roots emerging from the wet soil.  Our minds drift with the rhythm of our marching to places only we alone can conceive of. And then we stop. Jordan’s in the lead, and we hear him emit a hushed, reserved whisper, “What the hell?” and we look to where

The candle

he is looking, and we see a single, solitary tea candle sitting in the center of the path, its flame flickering in the light breeze, casting a circular glow onto our hiking boots and creating eerie shadows on the trees around us. And then the air gets a little colder and I clutch my walking stick a little tighter to me, and murmur that we should watch our backs, because candles don’t light themselves.

              We finish the hike and our legs feel like they will break in half if we walk any further, or lock up and paralyze if we take any breaks. And right now I could talk about the cheesy life lessons I drew up in my mind on the walk back, about how life is like a night hike and all you can see is the step in front of you without knowing the challenges that will come or how much longer the trek will be, but that would be terrifically boring of me.


Other pics:

Jordan and me

Megan and me

October 11, 2014

There is no such thing as sanity. I truly believe that sanity is a comfortable figment of our collective imaginations, a title we place upon people that tend to act in the same general manners as one another. That, or it means sobriety. But no, I think that sanity is a ruse, a thin sheet of ice under sun rays that we like to skate over. I live in a world that is insane. I am probably insane myself.
              Take my train ride to the airport for example. I went to pick up my best friend who is visiting from Virginia. Hallelujah I have a friend in Seattle for four whole days. And within the first ten minutes I notice this short, chubby gentleman with beady eyes and a fine layer of perspiration covering his beige skin. He appeared to be of Indian descent. I felt those eyes lock onto my face the moment I entered the cab. It began as ceaseless staring, even when I looked back. That's okay, he's a few aisles away. Stare out the window, fiddle with the phone, put in headphones even though there's no service for Pandora. But then he moves. Oh god he's moving, releasing a putrid cloud of stale body odor into the very air I am cursed to breathe right now. He shuffles his way towards me, battling imbalance on the moving train, and with dedication and perseverance takes a strong hold of the pole right next to me. He must be getting off on the next stop; I can hold my breath until then and refuse eye contact. Breathe. Focus. No, he's moving inevitably closer. The train stops, the doors open, but he makes no move to exit. He's standing over me, staring down at me. He's inches away. Why. Why me. I look up and I'm met with those beady eyes boring into my soul, a leering smile on his face, his chest rising and falling with each heavy breath he takes. I look away quickly. I'd like to think if I ignore him, he'll leave, but clearly he is motivated by inattentiveness. There is an empty cab and four exit doors and he is standing four inches away from me. I look at him and the corners of his mouth rise even higher. Enough is enough. I raise my hands and motion for him to step back. He nods his head and waves at me. Okay I'm not ruling out mental illness, so I want to be kind, but a line needs to be drawn. "Excuse me, miss," he says, as if I wouldn't have his attention if he just started speaking; he might as well be sitting in my lap. "I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable, I want to apologize, I'm sorry." Compassion, Sara, compassion. I grit my teeth and say, "It's okay, you're just very close and I don't know you. I think you should go sit back down over there." Then the train came to a stop and he exited.
              Headphones back in. Next comes a group of young men no doubt intoxicated by many different substances. They. Are. So. Loud. They rattle off Chubaka yodels as they pound out their pull ups on the train poles. Every rider is thoroughly disgruntled and as Seattle's skyline passes by my window I play this fantasy in my head where I boldly march up to the group and in a steady, fierce voice, declare to them that they are the most shameful display of adolescent testosterone that I have ever seen and that they should man up and learn to handle whatever it is they have used to intoxicate themselves. The fantasy doesn't satisfy my rigid anger but I suppose it staves off some of the frustration. Get me to this airport.
              Upon arriving, the maze of parking garages, train terminals, and airport gates throws me for a loop and it’s almost midnight and I just want to see my best friend and pretend to be sane for a little while. But you know what, the beauty that is unfolding before my eyes as I stand here at the exit for her gate lightens my heart and reminds me that insanity can be beautiful too. Two girls, who have clearly maintained a romantic relationship from some unknown distance, embrace and kiss passionately, and I can only imagine how long it's been since the two were together, and damn I feel as lonely as I feel moved by the scene. And then two friends run and meet in an extraordinary hug and I'm even more excited for my best friend to walk through the door. And a young guy stands with a huge bouquet of flowers and a sign I can't read, and my heart pounds harder for him as I see him pace anxiously, waiting for someone special to him to walk through that door. Because you know, we're all a little insane. We all love deeply, we all have insecurities and desires and fears, we all want to love and be loved. We want to be good enough, man enough, wild enough, accepted enough, and as hard as it is to admit sometimes, I think I like this insane world I live in and I doubt I’d have it any other way.

September 27, 2014

As of Thursday morning, one more Tinder profile was added to this world on the decline of organic social interaction. Did I fight the urge? Yes of course I fought the urge; who hasn't fought the urge to get a Tinder profile? No female likes degrading herself to five pictures on an iPhone app to be seen by men within 20 miles of her between the ages of 23 and 29. And what if something actually works out? It's okay, we can tell Mom we met on a street corner when I asked him for directions. As far as Mom's concerned, Tinder doesn't even exist. But the rest of the world? Well, I've stopped wondering what the rest of the world thinks of what I do. I can't say I've stopped caring, but I have stopped wondering.

Anyway, I joined for a network. A chance to meet new people in the area. It brings me marginal solace to see that many others on Tinder joined for the same reason: new to Seattle, eager to meet new people. I think they should create a Tinder for friends. But either way, I had my first Tinderella story last night and I can’t say it went as I had expected. A very personable fellow, tall, blue eyes and blond hair. Certainly attractive, as anyone would be that you meet on Tinder. So personable, in fact, that before the night was over we had visited the Men’s Warehouse, the Chase bank, the grocery store, the dry cleaners, and the local pub so that he could say hello to all the people he knew who worked in these places. I’ll spare you the details, but it was clear by the end of the evening to the both of us that it wasn’t going to work out between us. His friend drove me home, a friend we’d met up with at the Oktoberfest we visited before a comedy show we planned to attend; we never made it to the comedy show.

You know, I have this fear of romantic love. I know this sounds like the first chapter of a Nicholas Sparks novel, but really, I just have this fundamental distaste for the idea. And to be frank I’m not sure why I’m even writing about it on this blog, except that it’s somewhat relevant to the post. Don’t worry, though, I’m in no mind to unload all my romantic baggage upon you. As Nathaniel Hawthorne says about autobiographer, “we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil.” So to continue, I think I believe in true love, at least I’d like to, but I’m not really sure. I’m afraid of what I’ll discover in love – that it’s not as beautiful as people say it is. A fear of disappointment then? I’m afraid of knowing someone so deeply and to be known as well. I know I have these vulnerable, insecure sides of myself that I hate unleashing to the world of the Here and Now – I prefer to keep them tucked away so I can pretend they don’t exist – and love has this terrible way of bringing that stuff to the surface. I also fear that love means changing myself. I know love means compromising and sacrifice, but I’ve lost myself in love once before and I never want that to happen again. Yes, I’ve been in love before. I’m not in the mood to talk about it, but suffice it to say that it didn’t leave a good taste in my mouth concerning the issue. I just have a terrible, foreboding, fundamental feeling that love is passionate, vulnerable, and short-lived. And I don’t even want to begin to speak of marriage.

If you’re reading this, please share your thoughts, your experiences, your feelings on this issue. Leave a comment on the blog post; it can be anonymous. The world sees a lot of brokenness in love, and I suppose I’m losing hope, and I would value the input of others. I haven’t given up yet, though. Like my friend Evan says, “If not for the hope to be able to love and be loved so completely by someone, what makes life worth living?”

September 24, 2014

I guess I could say I’m doing okay out here now. Nothing of significance has happened recently that plants itself in my mind to blossom into a blog entry later. No news is good news, I suppose. I find it a bit absurd at the amount of sedentary living I do; I suppose I can comment on that. I have a budget and a kitchen, and I eat a Reese’s at approximately 3pm every day, and I always wash the dishes as soon as I come home and I won’t eat until the dishes with which I used to cook my meal are clean too. Not that you, reader, should care about any of this meaningless nonsense, because in the end how interesting can it really be to read so much about one person that you have absolutely no vested interest in? No, no, I’m not fishing for compliments. I’ve only had a terrible experience of sitting in a hunting cabin with no excuse to leave while a fellow hiker explained to me the details of his newly built telescope, down to the size of each lens. It was such a long conversation, if you can even call it that, that my aunt had baked two whole batches of cookies before I could even get one single word into the conversation. I hope my stories aren’t so mind-numbing, but if you’re back to read this, suffice it to say I genuinely appreciate it. I will keep writing though, regardless of readership; it’s just the way it is, and one day, when I am married with a daughter, and I can appreciate with a whole new level of understanding the amount of pure lamentation I have given my poor mother over the years, I will walk into my daughter’s bedroom after she has announced a wild declaration to hitchhike to Alaska or to marry her first love or to start a cupcake bakery, and I will hand her these printed entries and tell her that the sun still rises on the other coast, and it’s still a sight worth seeing.

September 20, 2014

              The homeless population here overflows, especially in the University District where I live. You see them sleeping on every stoop on University Way between the hours of 1am and 7am. I’m distantly yet insatiably curious to know these people and their lives, because I fear that the only thing I really know about homelessness is the stereotype that exists surrounding it. Whether the stereotype’s true or not doesn’t matter; the point is, I never want a stereotype to be all I know about something. That’s why I walked up to a group of them with my friend Lauren. She and I are walking down the sidewalk, having a cigarette and pondering life, when we see tents set up right on the concrete and a large group of approachable individuals with lots of backpacks. So we approach them and meet a guy called Bear. He stands in a sea of cardboard signs that, in a nutshell, raise awareness for the need to have a centralized location for homeless people to camp so that they don’t have to be on the streets of every urban neighborhood. A mission I can get behind. Anyway, Bear’s this big guy in his 30s with a beanie pulled low over his head and tattoos creeping up his neck and down his arms. He’s not homeless; he has an apartment that he won’t go home to until he sees his family out here on the streets have a home to go to as well. He’s a leader, an advocate, with an electric energy of safety and benevolence that you sense as soon as you pass within 10 feet of him, and the whole mood of the group is contingent on his presence. He keeps the angry ones calm, the sad ones happy, and the lonely ones accepted. I notice that others pick up on his vibes - people encourage each other to stay out of the way of passerby, no one asks for money, and everyone abides by Bear's standard of no alcohol or illegal drugs. Bear bridges the gap between the homeless and people like me who only know the stereotypes. He’s got a story, a past you could write a TV drama about, and he shares it shamelessly and passionately. He always thought himself invincible, he tells us, until he realized the one person he couldn’t beat was himself. “How did you realize this?” Cancer, he says. Stage 1 prostate cancer. And in fact, his stomach is doing flips from his chemo yesterday, so he excuses himself to go smoke some weed, and if we would like, we are welcome to join.

             I don’t smoke, but hell, why not stand there and have a conversation? We’re accompanied by a woman named Michelle and an older man named Russ. We stand together, the five of us a motley crew, and Bear lights up a joint. It helps with the nausea from his chemo treatments, he tells us. Otherwise, he takes no drugs and drinks no alcohol. I sit on the edge of a cold cement wall and draw my knees up to my chest and observe these strange and wonderful people. This is his dad, Bear tells us and points to Russ. Russ has this fantastic white beard that shakes while he tells me how he left the Marine Corps in the 50s and spent the 60s in D.C. around Dupont Circle and then the 70s in San Francisco, and then finally picked Seattle. They say when you come to Seattle you never leave, whether you’re Kurt Kobain, Jimmy Hendrix, or Russ the homeless guy. Michelle says that even Pearl Jam is around and sometimes you catch a glimpse of the band members walking down the street, and that’s when I realize how strange and ironic life can be, seeing that last night I hung out with Pearl Jam’s guitarist and tonight I’m in an alley with some really awesome homeless people informing me that sometimes you can see Pearl Jam's members around. Anyway, Bear calls Russ his dad and it’s really striking because Bear lost his parents at a young age and ran away from his Boston orphanage at age 12 and hopped a train to Seattle. In the brief time I stand with them I see this authentic fatherhood from Russ to Bear, especially when Bear gives him this big hug and the old man’s eyes light up with this uninhibited joy and it’s all just a little bit beautiful.

What do you think of this Seattle vibe? That’s what Michelle asks me, her raspy, manly voice and masculine face on her feminine body leaving me to wonder what exact gender she could be. I smile and very bluntly tell her that my upbringing was about as Republican conservative white girl as it gets, and that the vibe here in Seattle attracts me and terrifies me all at the same time. Hell, I’m a virgin that’s never smoked pot, living in Seattle hanging out on the streets with some homeless people, and I’m having the time of my life. The answer satisfies her and I like that I can be different here but accepted at the same time. It’s enough that I want to stand with these people; it doesn’t matter how I feel about it. Opinions can be dauntingly arbitrary.

Lauren, Bear and me