MisNopalesArt on etsy

It is a strange thing that all that is holding our blood and guts and tissue inside is SKIN. Skin is amazing. It heels back over, you can graft it. It grows and changes with you. It amazes me that the worst that happens is that it will get wrinkly as we get older, and if we live a really long time, it gets papery and thin. We are very blessed at how many do-overs God lets us have with this single body we've been given.

72 hours from now, I'll be on a plane.

I can feel God protecting me and holding my hand through all of this. I'm watching him tie it up with a bow and give it to me like a present.
-I think I'm going to still have my job when I come back.
-Spanish Oral evaluations went pretty well, and I'm done with Spanish for the rest of my college career
-I'm 34% done with my Horror paper (so that must mean I have 10 more hours)

"Like a soldier, one foot in front of the other."
Regina Spektor

We keep going.

Hell week

I can't believe I just went through this 4 months ago. It seems like yesterday.

I can't remember names. I can pull up faces, but not names. I've been drinking more cups of coffee than I thought I was capable of.
I'm still only two pages into my Horror paper. I think after Spanish Oral Evaluations in the morning, I'll be able to think clearer.

The time is flashing before my eyes.

Alright, what is next?

My workplace is very dramatic right now, but I am trying to ignore it all, and just enjoy my last week. Yesterday, I walked in, and there were balloons at my station, and the board that we use to post mortgage rates said. "Rachel's last week!" And something else nice about saying goodbye. I think we might have a little party, and I just can't believe how nice they are being, because I've only worked there for 8 months. Ashleigh calls it "Graduation goggles", where everything is suddenly rosy, and you think to yourself, "Why am I leaving here, again?"

I had a really nice Spanish dinner with Ashleigh and Dan, and amazing wine. And then we walked to the frozen yogurt place, and my heart was so full and so happy.

But as I lay in bed and couldn't fall asleep, I thought to myself about what the air smells like, standing on the back-porch of my grandmother's house, and I know I'm doing the right thing, even though it's going to be so hard to see her in pain, when she was so lively at Christmas time.

"I'm alright, don't I always seem to be? I've been swinging off the stars, don't I wear them on my sleeves?"
-Brandi Carlile

My dentist told me to start brushing with my left hand. To slow down, and stop taking my anger out on my teeth.
I need a drink before you sit down and tell me this.
Sometimes when I am leaving your house at 11:30 at night, I still see a very old man leaning into his computer, in his office, and I think why is he still there.
I am trying to listen to Mumford and Sons, and all I can think is this guy sounds like a folk-pop version of Eminem. Or something.
Still, my favorite sound of all time is when your car slows down on the interstate, on the off-ramps mostly. It is the sound of going home. Whether to your home in Utah, or your home in Iowa, and your home in Illinois.

I walk down the halls, I try to think of how many ways I can say,
The wind is at my back.
I'm walking on clouds.
There is warm sunshine, and I am wearing sunglasses.
All the wine is all for me.
The icing on the cake.
The world is my oyster.

"I bribed them to sing a song that would drive us insane and make our hearts swell and burst."
-Joe Banks, Joe vs. the Volcano

I watched a couple kids over the weekend as per the Marriage Conference and there being a general lack of single people around, I was asked to by Nancy, regardless of what people may be thinking in their heads... Have I ever even seen Rachel around a small child? But I have been around two small children now.

On Saturday, I woke up on the couch to Isaac yelling my name from his bedroom. I thought it was still around 4a.m., (it was 7:30)
"MISS RACHEL, I WET THE BED!"
"No you didn't, you are wearing a pull-up." I told him.
"Oh. Can I get up now?"
"I guess."

And I realized, when you have kids, not only do you work all week to put their needs first, but you also have to do this all weekend. And when you were twenty two, you could wake up late, eat waffles, go back to bed, and then watch OnDemand all day until you apply your face and go to church.
I heaved a sigh of relief that I am still twenty two, and I vowed to let my poor future children watch as many episodes of Alec-Baldwin-narrated-Thomas-the-Tank-Engine as they want on Saturdays. But also to teach them to read when they are four. Maybe this will even things out.

"You are married, right?" Isaac asked me at lunch time.
"Ha! Noooooo. Definitely not."
"You are married!" He yelled at me, and put on his pouty face, which he does whenever you contradict anything he says.
"Nope. If I was married, I would be at the marriage conference, or at home watching my kids. Why do you think I am married?"
"BECAUSE YOU ARE MARRIED." He yelled back.
"Okay."

Sometimes, after a glass of wine, I think I am married. To Bob. I think Bob and I live in Holladay or Salt Lake, and that he is kind enough to me to never think about getting a dog. I don't think about how we ended up married, but we accidentally did, and I sleep well at night because of the gun sitting on the night-stand. We do not have a car-port, because car-ports are terrifying. Car-ports are always the beginnings of my worst nightmares ending in me chopping at the brachial or carotid arteries of a bad guy with a car key.

I think I dream this dream because of reading my friend Kristie's blog, and she seems to live in a gingerbread house and writes her life in lists of things she's living through with her husband.

Bob, maybe if I had let you ask me to dance instead of running and hiding in the bathroom, we could have had this life together. But you are fine and I am fine too.

I want to do a big backpack trip into the mountains where you take everything in on your backs. I think this will help me reconcile my current Out of the Wild dreams.

I want to become a penny-pincher. I wish I could become like my friends who live by the bare minimum. I want to do this to be saving up for something really grand or exciting.

I want to go on a Central or South American mission trip after college.

I am starting to think through what I'm packing for my Iowa adventure. I put a couple things for sale online to try to make the most money possible to prepare for being jobless.

I did spend a few sunny minutes on my back porch watching the Aussies running around. But for being so Sunday Ambitious, I really didn't get anything done today but watch shows OnDemand and do half of a Jillian workout.

school days

Every one knows I love school.
It took me a few years.
It took me losing a few heart-warming things.
It took me time for literature to sink in.

For a few years, I felt like every other student was smarter than me, and that they all knew something I didn't. Or worse, that they had taken a class that taught them all about Lacan's mirror theory, or about how to ace MLA for writing papers. Or maybe I needed to smoke weed to get the deeper meaning of everything. But it turned out I was just young and was only taking 2 or 3 classes a semester, so I really wasn't reading as much as the other English students who were wearing weird clothes and didn't have real jobs.

Now, I love school. And it's not like I feel part of this elite academia like "Skinny Harvard Girl" (see "Harvard" label) or Pilar*, and it's not always just about the learning and the knowledge. It's just about being there. It's just about taking the bus or the train to this place.

The university...it feels secluded. It feels far away from my house (it is) and it feels like there are no children there. (Sometimes I see a child, and it is like, where the heck did you come from?) It feels like a place I travel to.
The iPod is involved in getting there. Moody music and This American Life.
Snacks are involved. Packing your bag for the long hours.
Reading books you never would have read. Forcing yourself to learn and think in a second language, just because it is required for your Bachelor's in Art.

But besides being a road trip, College is full of surprising people. You put them under a certain amount of pressure, and watch them start to boil. OR, you just take away their parents, and find out that they are actually primates.
You see girls who are wearing sunglasses to class because they are hungover. You see a boy in the Library commons trying to get you to vote for a ficus tree instead of the students who are running for office. You see a kid walk down the hall in a shark costume.

And one day, maybe you are just washing your hands in the girls' bathroom after spending an entire class period searching for the deeper gender politics in the British Horror movie The Descent and standing there, staring at you, is an old man. A very old man. And you are embarrassed to try to think how to tell him he is in the women's restroom. He is giving you an awkward smile because he is trying to think how to tell you that you are in the men's restroom. You know there is another girl in the stall, but you think, This old guy is pretty harmless, so you don't say anything, and as you walk away, you see him looking for urinals and not being able to spot any. And you hope the other girl doesn't see him, and you hope no other girls see him.
And perhaps they don't.
And you reassure yourself that it was definitely an old man, because he had a real beard.

"And all the wine is all for me."
-The National

*Character bio: Pilar
Pilar sits next to me in Spanish, and makes me feel old because she is 18. She has no job, but takes like a buttload of credits and plays Lacrosse. She is the most fluent in our Spanish class, besides our professor. She also takes Greek, because she is Greek. I have a deep and undying need for her to approve of me, because she is a way cooler 18-year-old than I ever was.

photo courtesy of Discovery Channel

Philip got me hooked on this show. It's called Out of the Wild.
I caught up on two more episodes over the weekend, and it's all I see when I close my eyes.

The premise is that they dropped these (nine?) people off in a desolate part of Venezuela and they have to trek 70 miles over mountains, jungles, and Savannah. They got 3 days of survivor training, but for the most part they are just ordinary people from California, Michegan, Illinois, etc. There is no prize at the end if they make it.

I think that's what gets me most, is they are out there in these horrible circumstances, and just because they want to accomplish this goal. They usually trek for a day, set up camp, and then spend a day or two trying to find food. They never find much: they catch a couple of fish, or eat some larvae or termites, and these hard disgusting bark-fruits. They are eating an average of like, 300 calories a day.

And the funny thing is, that watching them keep trekking together, emaciated and dizzy, I want to be there with them, doing it.
Or do something like it.
It makes me want to do some kind of fun summer adventure.
More to come.

i have dreams

In my daydreams, I am sitting next to someone who smells nice. There is Russian music in the background, and when I touch the skin on my face, it is soft like summer and I no longer crave sugar. I crave to run through the fields and have itchy farm-legs. To run until I gasp for breath and Rosy runs next to me, and in the end of the dream, we both jump into the lake, and no seaweed will wrap its arms around me and drag me down into the snapping turtles on the bottom.

The real dreams I have at night are stress dreams. Stress dreams of leaving children very much un-babysat. I leave them before their parents come home, and then always in the dreams (with or without the children) I have to run from Sandy to Murray. Or from Salt Lake to Holladay, and I never know how long this will take me. I run to babysit these kids. Or I run for other reasons.

Every time I see a white Land Rover, I recall the red-faced couple who came to get their extra-dry 1 pump white mocha soy cappuccinos and sandwiches with the sausage taken off. I quickly recall the nightmares that they gave me.

Lord, have mercy on me.

I got 100% on a Spanish quiz, we had an interesting Horror/Gender discussion today, and I was able to name the perfume that one of my clients was wearing while I was at work. So, pretty successful day I would say.

Well somebody has a hot date
and I think it's Noah. I think he smells like Usher. Whatever cologne he is wearing, there is a lot of it, and it is flavoring my Chinese food in the wrong direction.

To live here is confusing. And you may say, "Rachel, remember that time you said that one has to become a mind-reader to survive?" Well I did say something like that. I think it was pertaining to relationships.
But something you aren't prepared mentally for, is to hit your 23rd birthday, and to still be living with your parents, and jobless, and still going to college.
You aren't prepared to stand next to a skinny 20 year old in front of the library, and hear her talk about graduating next year and moving to Boston, and living a really exciting life.
And maybe you look at this skinny girl, and you think about how she loves Arrested Development and Joe Vs. the Volcano as much as you do. And you sigh, because this other girl, she gets up in the morning and wears a skirt and tights, and lives in the dorms, and takes a shuttle to Spanish. She is living out the Harvard dream instead of you. She is more Betty Draper than you, too.

It might be a heartbreaking moment. But you pull yourself onto the bus, and the guy next to you chats you up, and you still got it, a little bit. Dave is looking at you, wanting to know your phone number because you are a good wholesome girl, born in the Midwest and sensible in all the Prairie Home Companion type ways.

I close my eyes, lean my head against the window. There is a place in my mind, where I don't have to share a car. Where I ride my bike or the bus to Everywhere. Where I talk 12 credit semesters, and have 300 Bible verses memorized. Where I have never let a boy hold my hand. Or I have been married to a handsome black man, and we always iron our clothes, and at the end of the day go to Jazz games and drink Bud Light out of clear plastic cups. Depending on how I'm feeling on this particular bus ride.

But ultimately, I am happy here. I love my family. I enjoy the privilege of driving a car when it is inconvenient to take public transit. I am still going to an amazing university, and the "Harvard" girl sitting next to me heard the same Jorge Luis Borges words that I did today. But maybe it affected her differently. Maybe I am the lucky one.

So there are these little pills I been taking
And my doctor, she says that they're safe
But I been sleepwalking down to the lake
And waking up in the water
-Jenny Lewis (with Johnny)

I think, "Adam and Eve, did you have to take these pills to get rid of allergies? To keep your guts from rotting within you? To settle your stomach so that it didn't come back up? Did you take antibiotics after you had strep throat?" And the answer is no. No they didn't.
Our DNA keeps breaking down more every year.

Well. I can't prove that. I don't know anything that has to do with science. But that's what my dad says, and he is the only person I believe about science, and I think it's because he knows about as much as I do.

I might take more pills than the average person my age. I get headaches, I get allergies, I get other painful problems.
With the more preventative pills, I think to myself, "What will happen if I stop taking this?" But it is just a really bad idea.
And it ends up being,
that this is real life.
That sometimes diet and exercise are not a cure-all.

But yes, one day we will be on the other side, and Adam and Eve will be like, "Wow, it really escalated quickly down there." And we will nod.
All the old grandmas and I. The old men will nod with me, and the other 22 year old girls who are taking 7 pills a day. "Yes it did," we will say.

life in Utah

One thing I still haven't figured out, is staying hydrated. I drink more water than anyone else I know, but I am constantly thirsty.

I thought I would see a huge difference after I quit alcohol. But, I haven't. And yes, I usually have one cup of coffee a day. And I take an allergy pill, which sure doesn't help. But it doesn't seem like it should be this hard. I typically drink 3 liters of water a day, and any of my coworkers I've ever had could tell you how often I have to run to the bathroom.

I can only think that it comes down to living in the desert, and how dry the air is here.

So.
It's Friday night, my family is gone who-knows-where. Celisse hasn't answered the phone. I think it's going to be a quiet night to read, watch my dogs pace back and forth, and cook a fish in my toaster oven.

I was thinking I'd be excited that it's April 1st, but it is making everything loom over my head. I have to start thinking about my hard conversation I'm going to have with G. I am going to the dentist next week. And then finals are coming up, and at the same time packing, and having my things in order.

I feel like I am getting on a boat. I will be out at sea for a month. Judy will be there. There will be lots of books to read, and comforting silences.
And yes,
there will be Long John Silvers there.