As part of some Haloween bit at work, I painted my nails black to go with my stolen Starbucks apron and emo-liner eyes. I had to take out my fake lip ring an hour into work, first because people were scowling at me and second because it prevented me from talking or smiling, both of which are survival techniques in supraburban California.

I closed up the bakery in the dark and drove home to the rhythm of windshield wipers. I turned on a few lamps (but tried to keep stealthy against trick-or-treaters, who might be charming, but might also in my over-imaginative world be serial killers or folsom prison break-outs [one in the same really].)

I sat for hours in the calm thunder and fingered through journals and wrote and wrote. It’s only been a week or two since I started writing again, started feeling my way through syncopation, begging with each word for some kind of resolve. Which I’ve been looking for for awhile now, but which also would be convinient to present to some admissions committee, to pretend I know what the heck I’m doing with my feeble existence. My paragraphs break up a lot more frequently than they used to…sometimes my writing looks more like block poetry and less like thoughts or memories at all. What can be said about my life that makes sense? Or what can be said in lines and words that at all explains what I’m trying to say, what I’m trying to ask?

I started to trace black over black, writing and remembering, letting pages fly behind my black thumb, picking out dates and paragraphs, looking for lines to meet in some kind of meaningful frame. But my stubborn eyes kept moving from word after useless word to my ridiculous black fingernails.

And I always get distracted by watching my hands, but even this morning, as I filled cups with dark roast or reached to bag another blueberry scone, my hands looked like truth to me, like they were telling me my own story, reading the words I couldn’t write back to me, filling in the blanks of all I’ve wanted to say.

And it seems like some ridiculous joke, right? But I’m earnest here, there is something so much more true about my black fingernails than anything that I’ve tried to express honestly over the past few weeks, maybe the past few years. There is some “me” I barely recognize here. But it makes me smile to look at my hands and feel like I’m saying something about myself, if only to myself, without disclaim.



(This girl has been listening to too much Death Cab).

in copenhagen with jess and pat doyle:

copenhagen is the most expensive place on earth. after the nazi occupation, the extortionists moved in, and decided to charge absolutely exorbitant prices for your everyday average product, and fool both tourists and locals into supporting this ridiculously bourgeoisie economy. today sara and i wandered around in the pouring rain through kierkegaard museums, chic shops and rich looking copenhagenese to find that every single food item (except for the clearance loaf of bread and box of raisins, which sustained us) costs a ligament, or a small portion of a ligament (which i need to afford grad school). So you might somewhat understand our predicament, the Big Mac here costs thirteen dollars American. I laughed so hard at this and several other price tags that I almost started crying in the supermarket. It was splendid.

jess and pat are wonderful, and its great hanging out with them. We're going wandering around the next few days, to some amazing sushi place and some fantasy hc anderson inspired theme park (that, they tell us, is not as cheesy as it sounds...we will see). I've laughed more in the last 12 hours then I have in a long time.

I will write more about London and Scotland and Frankfurt later. Life has been overwhelming. And strange. And unexpected. Being alone in Europe is forcing me, somehow, to watch myself grow up, or grown up, or try to accept the fact that I've already grown in some sense, like I'm watching myself on the steps of the Trevi fountain. It's strange. Pat was just telling me about structural indifference in regards to memory, and a moral responsibility to be involved with the substance of our memories. I find myself making and relating, making and relating, and wondering how to move forward.