maybe this just means we're used... no longer new.

...off a boulder where he'd been invisible,
or just longevity reflecting on itself
between the sky clouding over and the lightly ruffled
water.
this was the morning after your dream of dying, of being held
and told it didn't matter.

- eamon grennan.

green twining like a mass of snarled poofy hair, attention drifts to aluminum accented by the sprinkling of red and orange lights. through the crack in the glass, beyond the height, lies one...tall. along the ledge inside... here is green tea and gray tea, sicilian bergamot earl pure leaf tea. herbal and black tea, vanilla and chai tea, rooibos red african blend tea. manhattan and the sarangheti meet in the middle, telling tales of taxi cabs and waterholes, although the parallels between the two are almost invisible upon first glance. scribbles. black ink dripping in to pages...curling like barbed wire and wrought iron gates.

i'm all sorts of off balance. although usually when this happens i get this sort of uneasy i think i might vom but maybe i'll just be uncomfortable for two and a half hours feeling...the type that causes me to become painfully obviously anxious at social functions and in the midst of ice breakers. but i'm not getting that feeling right now! its sort of weirding me out. i'm still in the awkward situations. still don't like meeting new people [not the actual knowing them...the meeting them part.] and i definitely haven't become more talkative than i used to be. but i'm so much more comfortable in my uncomfortability, it isn't freaking me out nearly as much as it used to. i think i'm off balance because of a) the transition to sophomore year [which is inherently uneven... do i or don't i want to major in this? will i or won't i finally find a place on campus? is this or isn't this what i want to do with the rest of my life?!] and b) the realizations that i've made about myself over the past three months. i think i changed more over the summer than i did over the course of my first year of college, although without those nine months, none of the changes would have taken place, as they did lead to most of the influence that caused them. but being back in the roch, with the people that i am most familiar, caused me to recognize the truest parts of my personality and the aspects of others that i respect most. so now that i'm back in madison [tangent: isn't it strange how you can say 'i'm back...' in reference to two different places and mean basically the same thing? how can one have two homes and not attain an identity crisis? the application of andrew largeman's wisdom in garden state is becoming even more glaringly obvious...] i feel like i can really get what i want out of the illusive college experience, if only because i sort of know what i'm looking for. at least on some level, the definitions of my dreams are clearer. the pixels have become smaller, the view has become wider, and when i look out on library mall, i don't see a photograph in a pamphlet, i see minutes and hours and days of my life. which is pretty mind-blowing, when you really think about it. to be able to see whole bits of your life in a photograph. a moment, captured in a flash of light on reddish-bronze film. but that moment can mean whole years to your existence, depending on the epiphanies that you can have inside them.

three things i'd like to say blatantly:
my hair looks sexy when i've got it pushed back with bobby pins and a headband, tied in little pigtails at the base of my neck. especially when the part is a little crooked and chunks are coming out every which way. also... i look hot with an eyebrow(n) ring, and no one can deny that. [ a) i'm not conceited, i promise. i just love my little silver facial piercing. its what i've been looking for to complete my face for my whole life. and b) i called it an eyebrow(n) because my father likes to remind me that i referred to my eyebrows as such when i was small...amusing him, and therefore, amusing me in my wisened old age. and by old age, i mean approximately two decades.]
i want my book back, dammit. this means a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. if anyone knows me at all, they know that i am obsessed with that book. and it's been missing from my possession for over three months now. causing me to have heart palpitations and small seizures. dave eggers is my god! i need his satiric wit and charming, effortless observations back in my life. and also all musings about toph are hysterical, thereby causing me to laugh, thereby causing me to live longer. (it's been proven that if you laugh more often, you add years to your life.) i'm dying sooner everyday that the book is missing from my being!
i have a green thumb. my bamboo plant is huge, the oregano plant i bought for a dollar fifteen at shopko has turned into a small mess of vines on my window sill, and don't even get me started about the spiderplant i raised in a milk carton from the tender age of five til approximately fifteen. professor sprout would be begging me to be her assistant if i were to be taking herbology. [is it bad that i just referred to harry potter as though it were a real place? is it worse that i doubted its existence?!]


I don't know what's happening to me. I seemed to be unraveling.