Nutso-Emotional, or just passionate. Either way, HERE I COME.

My freshly painted enthusiasm seems to have gotten a little sticky with too-quick overuse, and I wanted to run away, again. There’s something about that ‘again’ that just makes it so prickly and defeating. Again. I have these fears often, Again admits. Like every-day often.

How do i sift through the compost of my ridiculously large fears of inadequacy when the precise problem is that i cannot do anything? i don’t have enough money to eat, let alone to sing. singing costs money, i bet you didn’t know. and then i have to, like, pay for an apartment on top of that. but i have to keep flowing into something better and greater and bigger than my own little voice…i tire of my own crutches.

i want to be the blind leading the seeing, the knowledgeable, teaching them about the sky the way blind people only seem to know—awareness, appreciation.

and it has to be instinctive, like typing without looking….all this without looking. blind. it is inside me, the instinct. i want spark it inside others, without pretense and with a whole truckload of emotion. i read that passion is defined as being highly emotional. Gosh, passion just sounds so much more sophisticated than blown out of proportion emotional.

it is these emotions, i’ve described, that lead me to do what i do. steve jobs says you gotta find what you love; he dropped out of college and was just as broke as i’m about to be, and then he became a bajillionare and then he got fired and started all over again, and he liked it. he says it’s all because he loves what he does. and he re-evaluates every day and decides how he wants to live his life, because he almost died one time from cancer. this dude has got to become a mormon, gosh, just read it.

and so i want to do what i love, with no delays. the enthusiasm is still sticky. I warn you, I’m still going to be afraid. I already know. But every day, I feel it stronger. i’m going to give up the padding of education and a bunch of study study reading reading practicing times seventy nine for years before i start. well, i mean, i still want that, that’s the goal. so the point is, i’m not going to wait.

this fall, i am starting a community gospel choir.

in provo. and i’m going to be the director. (eek.squeal!)

we’re going to sing gospel and soul music. (just fyi, soul is just the secular version of gospel.)

and you’re going to be in my choir.

yes, you. i do not care if you have never sung a note; singing is instinctive in all human beings. i can give you the love. remember those fears and the inadequacies? we must do the things we think we cannot.

i also do not care if you’ve never heard a lick of gospel. you’ll be converted. and we’ll shout amens together and clap our hands and smile and get uplifted and just you wait!! you’re gonna love it.

I’m probably going to knock on your door and harass you.

so, what i mean is, see you there.

900 pounds

SOOO here I am again, blogger, because I’m dripping with freakout-age today because my best friend is having probably the biggest day of her life thus far, as we speak. bigger, somehow, than the day she got into byu (we knew she would) or the day she moved out of our apartment (probably a lot bigger for me than for her) or even the day that HE left.

because now, today, HE is coming home. and they are in love and stuff. and i just keep talking about marriage and babies and things of that nature. but uh, she still hasn’t seen him quite yet so uh, we’ll keep the baby makin on the down low, of the entire internet. so secret.

she had this terribly horrid fear that she was going to wake up this morning weighing 900 pounds and not be able to move from her (obviously crushed) bed, much less fit through her doorway, butterball up the stairs, into her car, and onto a PLANE to deliver her to the arms of the love of her life (who would end up with the same fate as the bed if she weighed 900 pounds.)

she calls me, frantic. a disaster of hilarious proportions has arisen. so then she’s going to the gym, she can’t take this no mo. she’s ripped all the clothing from her closet to try to figure out what to wear. we are driving to her aid. this is HUGE.

she jumps around so giddy and dumps an armful of boxes and glass vials, her lifetime collection of perfume, in our laps. She needs to know which one to wear. OHHHH, we say—we feel the weight.

Brooke: “Do you have any more Kaylie Smell?….Wait, didn’t he say that he just likes the smell of your deodorant?”

She laughs, and her eyes crinkle and glitter as she recounts the story of the one time she DIDN’T wear perfume and he went nuts for her Dove fresh.

“HE’S ON THE PLANE!!!!” She flops her limbs a little bit, then launches into a hip jive that includes shouts of “WELCOME TO AMERRRRICUHHHH!” We are giggling, hugging in a circle, jumping on the grass and SHOUTING, SHOUTING.

sdfakjfdalfjkasklfjasdfWell wanna know what ,she didn’t wake up weighing 900 pounds, she’s on a plane, and he IS the love of her life.

And uh, BABIES.

hehhh.

She thinks jazz is crunchy

THIS IS WHY I CAN’T WAIT TO LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY. 

(don’t experience it without the audio.)

So get this, he plays in subways AND Carnegie Hall. And he has the coolest mustache, and the prettiest, most deliciously accessible yet elegant way of talking about why he does what he does. And he brings people together, makes them forget themselves for a minute and listen. Gosh, he talks about music so beautifully. “You don’t make music—it comes through you.” 

I want that! To blink notes, breathe in blues, steep chords into my esophagus and sweat symphonies…(Well, that might be a little gross?)

Rique, I love you a little bit.

 

my title is in reference to a jazz concert that Boyfriend and I went to last night, at which the pianist remarked that jazz is “crunchy.” I guess we all just want music to be edible, to get it inside us somehow…she wants to crunch and munch on her jazz chords, and I want to sweat symphonies. delish.

We all scream for…KENDRA.

This is what I do to Kendra while she is trying to eat ice cream. She plays along.

She tried to escape to the living room, but I sneakily followed her. There is no escape, Kendra darling. You should know this by now.

mmmmmmmmmm. forget ice cream. i scream for kendra.

A coffee shop on every corner

The sky swam with grayish clouds this morning and I missed the smell of coffee, walking along streets full of not 99% white people. There is a coffee shop on every corner, and the Mormon kids would go to Starbucks and get hot chocolate. But I loved that smell, and wished desperately that my name was Tully.

The hustle crowd, bustling to work—watching them, I longed to stop in the middle and let them swarm around me. I missed that salty, fishy smell from the Puget Sound and remembered how the view from Alki beach looked like the movies, how the sky looks so wide open and from the ferry you can see in panoramic and forwards and downwards and all directions, stretch of city and sea and it is beautiful.

 

I am taken back to Elephant Ears at the Puyallup Fair, samples of grilled corn and almonds at Bite of Seattle. I can only dip my leg in the fountain, cautiously, because my elbow is still busted from being a wannabe gymnast, jumping on the tramp.

I have just been CPR certified to make myself more marketable as a babysitter. Tara Low is coming with me to church and Girl’s Camp. I think all my brother’s friends are marriage material and spend most of my time contriving ways to see them and get them to like me. I even google it, before everyone googled absolutely everything. I am trying to force myself to cry outside the hypnotist show at the fair, because Ben is holding Kelli Harris who ruined everything and I am trying to be so sad that he will notice and take pity and break up with her and marry me…or at least take me on the Extreme Scream with him. I am so young, and my journal and my head are filled with nothing but boys.

 

I am boating at Lake Tapps, tagging along with my brother and the cool kids again. I am sleeping over at Courtny Jarman's, looking up at her ceiling that has clouds painted on it and coveting her hard wood floor. She’s a dancer. I love her and am surprised that she loves me, because I'm not as cool as she is. I am showing her my toe-touch, I am going to try out for cheerleading. I am wandering the halls of Riverside High, excited to be in Vocal Jazz sophomore year and not having a clue that I want to be a music teacher.

 

The summer is sweltering, I am draping my limbs on fans and eating healthy choice fudge bars with Natalie. I love her, and we talk about fashion and kids at school and beg our parents to drive us to Bellevue so we can go to Sephora and coat our arms in eye shadow and perfume—when I get in the car her dad is telling me that I smell very, uh, strongly, and we just giggle and giggle, back home to spend the night with crunch n munch and girl talk and Grease.

Then I am moving away. I am not wanting to leave. We have a going away party and I’m still killing myself to impress Isaac Lomeli and trying to start the boy shorts trend. I need more time for all of these things.

Natalie is there when we are about to drive away. We’ve had a rough few days, bursting into wet tears in between bites of peach yogurt after she gave me that immaculate scrapbook of the reasons she loves me, our memories together, the billions of photoshoots and movies we’ve made.

But we’re somber now, and we don’t cry. “It doesn’t feel real,” she says. I look down at my Old Navy flip flops and try to keep my hair from curling in the humidity. The sky is shining, blaring, no clouds. I need you, I tell her, hugging her long and tight. She looks at me a few times as we mumble our last goodbyes. Neither knows anything epic or movie-worthy to say. Then she turns slowly and walks down Nathan Avenue. My face is prickling in the heat as I walk toward the van, looking back again and again for her red curly hair or her freckles, but I can’t see her.

………………
The sky looks wide open, simmering with mixing clouds and splotches of blue. I scan the contents of this view that I have grown to love so closely, with mountains instead of trees and bikes and backpacks and shade shirts under tank tops. I love you both, I whisper. I look up to the sphere of melting gray and I let myself smile wide with the memory so pungent, the smell of youth and city life, Lakeland Hills and rain, and a coffee shop on every corner.

hey there veronica

Although I highly doubt that wearing, meditating (??) or surrounding myself with “Veronica” will help me balance my life, this thing is pretty freakishly accurate.

Try it here, if you wanna.

universe needs some educashun

   as luck would have it,
   leaving.
   as fate would dictate it,
   one week.
   as destiny that-i-can't-decide-if-i-believe-in would want it,
   probably forever.

     all these reunions and happy feel-good times are no longer  mine, because what the heck august came anyway, against my will. i want june chan back.

                               this sucks.

sux.
thx u r so kewl eye lurve u qt,
now if u could jus be n mi life id be so ha-p bc eye need u more than eye admit n eye am sa-p so sry but plz cant u jus rearrange the universe?

sometimes it doesn’t know what it’s doing so we hafta educate it.

it should go to college. the universe, i mean. it should go to the right college, with me, not in stupid cold small cave apartment place idaho, and do things how they’re supposed to be.

it ain’t posed ta be this way—tell stupidhead universe i said so.