she's amazing

I like this. This is the point where I always manage to sabotage myself, but...maybe I will manage to not shoot myself in the foot.

but I'm happy. very happy.

more later, i guess.

if i don't own it, it owns me.

if i don't talk about it, keep the spiraling words on a leash and let them into the backyard, then they go crazy inside the walls of my house and they tear down the walls and eat the carpet.

about a month before I came out entirely

When I was eighteen and you were still learning to drive we both finagled transportation to some neighborhood in the borough. It was hot outside and I was warm but not sticky when you started to talk about your ex-girlfriend and how you met her. How it was that she had been your first.

I found out many years later that there had not even been sex. That you were two kids, really, still practicing feelings and words and the dance of courtship.

But as we walked I told the story of the woman who had brought me out of my old shell, and whom i would have married if you could do that sort of thing in high school. We kept going, around cul-de-sacs and parked vans and kids playing. You kept talking about things that seemed dirty at the time: who liked who, what it was like to kiss a girl or meet her parents, how to come out. I was, at first, scandalized that the men on ladders painting and the women minding children and the kids on their bikes would know that we sometimes dated GIRLS.

And then, slowly, as the afternoon stretched on and the landscape changed from houses to 7-11 and the hair place, I realized two things. One, they probably were not listening that closely. And two, it didn't matter. We didn't have to know who we were. They had no say in it, either. It didn't matter what they thought of us. We didn't need all the answers about our lives. You didn't seem like you cared what anyone heard because you didn't care what anyone heard. Your life was your own.

This seems so simple now. But I want to pass it on.

i am not sitting in a local coffee shop right now

I like studying in Starbucks because the people noise and the music drown out the clutter in my head. I am not referring to voices here, but rather the detritus that blows about my attention-challenged mind like garbage on an abandoned beach. The urgent need to silence the distractions present in my own mind (mostly worries, flashes of insight about other people, fleeting thoughts of things I need to do for another class, or food cravings) outshines any constructive political need to avoid Starbucks/national chains/being out of my living space so long that my suitemates forget I exist.

And so I sit here, bemoaning the terrible music and cringing when certain people walk in and insist on harassing me. The devil you know...

I'm proud of myself, but

the trouble with lesbians is that we/they expect everything to be laid out beforehand. we don't wait for things to develop as they go; instead we plan it in our heads and then act it out. and then we are surprised when things play out differently than we expected, or we imagine where things could go and how bad they could be. it has to stop.

I'm also very aware of the fact that I feel like I did that one time I was sixteen and had a crush on someone unattainable. I'd run into her in the halls at school, and she'd always say hi, and I'd either start mumbling back (if i was alone) or nod and start talking about something very impressive (if i were with my friends). But mostly I would be distracted by my whole body turning to jelly. at that time, i didn't quite know why. now i do. but that doesn't make me any more graceful or any less afraid to fuck up.

school update

and...my Signal Transduction lecture tomorrow is by someone with a Chinese name from the department of biomedical genetics. Neither of these is ever a sign of a good lecture. At least they saved the notes as a ppt file instead of a pdf so we can actually annotate them.

It's the little things that count, I swear.

FUCK. Dear Andrea, please don't start things unless you can finish them.

I am unprepared for life. I feel jumpy and irrational and out of control. Last night scared some sense into me, probably, about how cautious I should be with myself. I also have confidence in myself, though. Just maybe not enough.


The song that popped into my head earlier was Digging for your Dream by the Indigo Girls, especially this part:

Every day that you get up and force your cards
Playing your story in fits and starts
Take your prospects and your pickax and you trudge down to the stream
And you bloody your hands digging for your dream

I'm trying here; that's all I know. It has to be better than nothing.