here it is

I walked in the door and started thumbing through mail that finally got here after I waited such a long time and my mother incredulously asks me, "Were you smoking in your car?" And yes I was. "Well, could you please leave your clothes outside?"
"Could you please leave Saturday night at Saturday night?" Don't be rude, guys. "I can't believe you were smoking in your car." Tanya's dad is in the hospital. They think he is going to die.

Tanya bursts into the room when I am on lunch; she is waiting for her husband to take her to the hospital, and somehow she is still thinking about me. I am lying on the couch with a blanket pulled up to my chin. It feels weird, your boss seeing you trying to fall asleep. It feels like she is at my house.
"Will you eat my lunch, Rachel?"
"What? You should eat it later, if you come back, you will be hungry."
"No, if I'm hungry I'll get something else."
"Tanya..."
"Please, Rachel, eat it. It will go bad otherwise." My shoes are on the other side of the room. I feel strange.
"Thank you Tanya, I will pay you for it."
"No don't worry..." we are sitting in silence. "I want to kill her, Rachel. I want to kill the bitch that kept pouring his drinks. I can never forgive her."

No, this is not about love, because I am not in love.

I met you at the bus station when we were both late for something. You were the tie dye in my shirt, or the black out I had yesterday at 11:43 a.m.
You were, essentially, the best cup of coffee I ever had.

I try to capture you and put your face in my dreams, but often I wake with very little success. Mostly you have forgotten all the poems I memorized for you. My handwriting that you never saw. The letters you didn't get because you were out of town, or out of the country. You were in the air and I tried not to love you like I tried not to breathe.

No, this is not about love, because I am not in love.
Of course there is guesswork that I've given up on, because I've gotten too old and stopped wearing my glasses.

Noah is in the room next door making sound effects ON TOP of the sound effects the game is making.

concentrate from argentina

The bird can sing like a cardinal now, imitate the microwave timer, catcall, and he is just learning to say "Pretty bird". The last part is sort of funny because when I first got Goulet, Philip said, "No, don't say pretty bird, the last thing we'd want him to learn is something as cliche as 'pretty bird'." I would also like to teach him to say "Bite me" but I don't think my family would love that.

I'm having a mid-week weekend. I'm skipping church to watch movies and eat oatmeal creme pies. You would too. Better than a midweek meltdown...

"So that I remember to never go that far, could you leave me with a scar?"
(Missy Higgins)

Its been one month and one day since Brian Reagan died. Everyday I go past the billboard on the freeway that says Beloved father, son and brother. But I didn't go past it yesterday because I stayed away from the freeway.
I always think that its interesting that he shares his name with the comedian, and until today, I was always thinking about when it would be a month since he died. It has probably been a hard month for his family.
I like to put months in front of months, because I think that whatever painful experience you've gone through, that more and more months equals healed over pieces of your heart. Pieces that the cuts and scrapes aren't so raw. So in Brian's one month of being somewhere else (Heaven or Hell, I guess God only knows a man's heart), I've been paid two times. The moon has gone away and come back. The days have gotten colder, but they've at least had more minutes of light extending them. It's even a new year.
I think in this last month, I realized that I needed to live a more drastic life because I've gotten comfortable, leaving (as Ben Dory would have said when we were six years old) butt marks on the benches at Amigo's. I think Ben might have gotten spanked for saying "butt" that time.
I realized this when I noticed I was saying the same thing to every customer, and that my job is so second nature that I feel like I've fallen asleep, and as I hand back the receipts to bank patrons that I can't even remember running the transaction.
I love my job. Lets get that straight. I love my job because my assistant manager is awesome. Anyways. I was saying a more drastic lifestyle.
This is 48 plus hours now of no secular music. Its hard and its easy. It gives me time to think and pray, but I just feel like some Regina Spektor or Damien Rice to shoot up my veins. It's good. It's been easier not to swear. It's been easier to just sit back and praise God.
Secondly besides my music fast, I've only spent $5 in the last three days which is hugely uncharacteristic of me. I'm on an actual budget because I do want to go to Spain.
And being poor and singing through the silence in my car has actually made me a happier person.

funny in a certain light how we all look the same.

I am going to Spain. I like to say it over and over again and feel the way it rolls out of my mouth and makes everything a little warmer and it makes things smell better.
I'm not going to Spain. Well, I don't even know yet.
But I'm planning on it, which is a little bit dangerous, and exciting, much like planning a love affair or playing the right line in the right part of a song.
Okay. Enough for now. I'll check back with you if I even get a passport.

I'm on a music fast right now. I'm not listening to music (in my car at the very least) so that I can be still and know that God is God, I guess. I need to talk to Him more. It's cool. I don't know how long it will last, but I'm 28 hours strong.

And I'm relearning Spanish. It's all coming back to me...

Here's some truth from the freeway. (far too early in the morning to be considered sensical)

I would like to step away from this whole "being a Christian thing". It sounds so easy to just do that, you know. I always have these five-minute-fantasies about moving away, and starting a new life to party and have fun and forget who I am.
But in the end, I know I can't. I know that Christ is sewn into my skin, and that no matter how much I don't like God all the time, I still love Him and that starting a new life would have my old problems tagging right along. You can't just forget about a relationship you have with someone who invisibly holds you every night. You can't just tell God to go away. It doesn't work.

For better, or for worse.

honey, there is love for you in my heart whether or not you want it. whether or not you can understand it.
I meet you in the distances, the frequent air pressure moments that make the fall apart so easy and delicate. and you are under my skin. holy and undeniable.
when the furnace turns on I can't feel it.
when the skin is broken my blood isn't about to leave this spot in my heart where it warms to the idea of you. the idea of what--
well, lets be honest. you will break me down into something you could tie up easily with shoe laces. Something you could ignore with a mute button.
But I am not afraid anymore.
I am just smoke floating in and out of window screens. Something that will stick to your clothes for a day or two, but you won't notice.
Will ya.

A couple weeks ago on This American Life, one of the stories was about this girl who received a heart transplant when she was 11, and later became friends with the family of the boy whose heart was beating in her chest after he was killed by a gang.
I've been thinking about it late at night sometimes, about what that would be like to have someone else's heart beating for you. She said she was so overwhelmed, like she had to lead a good enough life for the both of them, since he couldn't. It made me check my self to see if I was living a life worthy of this heart that beats in my chest. Made me grateful.
But also I thought, what if I could give my heart to someone who really needed it? Would I do that? What if some other girl needed my heart to keep living and she had three kids and a husband who loved her, and this fulfilling life... I wonder if I could give up my heart for something like that. Someone who was doing more with her life than I was..
Just a weird thought.

florence of calamity and joan of arc

We were drifting around Salt Lake City together, and it was something like falling in love. Or falling into a sudden friendship, even though we've been considering it for a while now. Her frequent and rushed phone calls that were always on the verge of tears.
"Its funny that I even met you at all," she said, while we were eating noodles and staring at one of those bored couples that don't have anything left to talk about.
"Yeah, I guess it is," I say, smiling to myself. She is so small and thin that she looks breakable. Like a delicate structure made out of sugar, or something equally blond and fragile.
Somehow, even in my shyness with her, and my fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of saying something that will freak her out, we are in the cab of my truck in sugarhouse, drinking coffee.
"When we were in there, I felt as if all those people were going to get me," she says simply and honestly. I know she's not making it up because she's spent the last three days in her bed, not leaving her apartment to eat or even get her mail. "I mean, I called my work and told them I had to have my tonsils out in an emergency. Who does that?" She grabs my arm suddenly. "Can I use your phone?" She asks me. And I let her.
"Yeah, I'm in sugarhouse," she says, "with my friend Rachel....no....no...she's a good influence. Shut up you asshole....no.." she starts searching through my purse all of the sudden.
"Do you need a pen?" I ask her, my head on the steering wheel, I'm not sure what is going on.
"No, sorry, just a twitch," she tells me, going back to the phone.
"Okay, we'll meet you at the library. You're a jerk." She hangs up. "That was the boy I am in love with."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. You'll come visit me won't you?"
"Of course I will. I'll bring you cookies, and CD's. Will you have a CD player there?"
"I might have an iPod."
"Oh."
"I don't want to go, it's stupid." We are in a window well on the fourth floor of the library, and I am staring at her profile. I'm scared that she will break my heart, a little, even though I barely know her. She always looks like she could start crying at any moment.
"Three months of rehab is better than six months of jail," I finally say.
"Can I give you a hug?"
"Please."
I hug her and wonder how I did even meet her. How she happened to me so quickly, and I start to think that maybe God knows what He is doing...

It was once so easy to just look at them and fall in love with them. Boys or girls. These days I feel a little ripped off by how long it takes me to trust someone even through their faults.
But I guess that's life.

I'm in much confusion about what is stable in my life. Everyone's always talking about how loosely you should hold onto everything. That God has to be in control. Which, I agree with, but what in the world am I going to hold onto so that I don't go careening in some other direction. I have no gravity. I have cold water and shaky thoughts and credit card debt and not enough coffee in the world to get me out of all of this.