I thought, I will sit down. I will collect and organize myself, and then I will get one cup of coffee and close my eyes until class starts.

And then I hear,


"Hey. Hey! What's up?"
And I look up and see Jenny Lewis is talking to me. But it's not Jenny Lewis. I have had not that much sleep, and no coffee yet. I have had a morning as the slowest swimmer in Crossfit, and the slowest burpees,  and no sugar yet, and scrambling to finish my cramming for my Comm test and then sentence-tweaking to hand out my story to my workshop, and here I am talking to Jenny Lewis.
Well, her real name is Jenny, and she looks like Jenny Lewis.
Every class period, she gets up halfway through to go to the bathroom, and I think that She Is So Brave to do that. I always envision a life where you can drink as much water as you want and go to the bathroom whenever you please, and it's a far off goal, and the answer is marrying a rich guy and never working again.
But Jenny comes to sit next to me and I admit that I am nervous to hand out my piece. I picture her leaving in the middle of class to go to the bathroom. I see her lazy, lilting walk, like she was maybe once a dancer, and she is used to having the attention, even though her hair is starting to grey in her mid twenties, and she talks like a pot head.

She starts to explain that she is done with her workshop piece too, even though she doesn't have to hand it out for another week.
She wants to tell me the story she wrote.
She gives me uninterrupted eye contact, which is really hard for me to handle. This is because of history of eye-contacters and also that I know now that certain colors burn out when you look at them forever. I look at the color of her while she tells me, giggling, that her story is about two young girls who get caught in a storm, and then a ditch--
"You want to know what happens?" Jenny asks, her head tilted to one side like my Australian shepherd at dinner time.
"Yes," I say, because it is the polite thing, and I know how to make friends in college by now.
"I'm not going to tell you," she says, eating a piece of chocolate, but offering me some.
"Oh it's okay, I have chocolate too, in my lunch bag," I say, blushing, and looking away to give my eyes a break from looking at her eyes.
Can you get high by looking at someone who is probably stoned?
"Well my chocolate is better than yours," she jokes, even though I've had those Love Letter Chocolate Bars before and the love letters they come with are less than inspiring.
I smile again and look back at her.
"I'll tell you how it ends, because I know it's killing you," she says.
I nod, trying to figure out where she comes from. How do people end up the way they are? What did their parents do to them? What did their lovers do to them?
"Well, the girls gets stuck, but then her brother grabs her hand," she said.
I looked at her.

I looked at her for another second, and then I realized that she meant that that was the end, and I tried to all of the sudden feign surprise.
"Oh he saves her?" I acted very happy to know the end.
"Yeah, well you don't know for sure. It ends with him holding her hand."
"Wow. I'm so glad," I said, in what I believe was a convincing version of me. But then in that split instant I wondered, do people think I am convincing or do they know that I'm just a phony? They can probably tell by my clothes, even though I am the only girl in class with plucked eyebrows and mascara on.
"Yeah," she says, so sure of herself, that I suddenly feel sure of myself. I feel sure of the chocolate brand that I have in my lunch pail. I feel sure of my burpees and sure that I breathe the same air in my lungs that everyone else breathes... but that it feels richer to me in some moments, and when I am sad, it may feel richer to them in their moments.

And the rich, fresh piney air that I thought was just something I smelled during Green Air Days in Utah, was actually fresh mulch that they surrounded the trees in the courtyard that I walk through every afternoon.

But I don't give up.

When people say that thing of how their marriage grows better everyday, well...

That is how I feel about college, which is a really unfortunate thing. I'm enjoying the last of the days.
When I sleep at night, I try to think how I can turn them into more days.

I didn't think I would like Roxanne at the beginning. Sometimes she would do things that would bug me, but now I find myself embracing her strange behavior, and her surprising concerns.

"I think I'm going to go to Bosley, and have them help me with my eyebrows."
"Your eyebrows? What? What is Bosley?"
"You know it's that commercial where they take hair from the back of your head and put it on the front of your head if you need it. But I'm going to have them fill out my eyebrows."
 "What if your eyebrows start growing as fast as the rest of your hair on your head?"
"Well, I will just trim them then."

The thing is, Roxanne's eyebrows look fine, and because she is crazy, I start looking for
whatdoIthinkaboutthatiscompletelyirrational
And anyway. It's probably good that Roxanne doesn't sit down at her computer at night and tell the internet the things that I am saying. 

let's get everybody drunk on sunshine


As my bus started to leave the downtown area, I saw two guys out on the lawn of some closed salon, and they were fishing. They were casting their lines into the lawn, and the sidewalk. Over and over.

I always think I've seen everything until I leave the house. And I'm so glad other people do embarrassing things in public besides me.

I have an embarrassing admission.
I eat sardines and other canned fish.


Tanya is the only person who has ever made me feel okay about this. But the truth is, I'm a freaky eater.
So I always try to find a spot where no one will bother me while I eat the fish (okay guys. Canned fish is a high protein snack that is easy to pack when you are going to be away from a fridge all day. And I am practically a shark, I love fish so much) but today, this guy found me and asked me to take a survey and I looked at him and raised my eyebrows, like, are you really okay that there is a can of fish on the table?
But he survived.

I'm intoxicated on pool water. I'm drunk on music. Maybe I like the spring more than I thought.

I'm having non-fiction writer's block lately. I haven't been able to make my real life seem funny or interesting, because no one wants to hear how awesome my vacation was, or how I went to another wedding where the married couple was younger than me.

So I will just rely on Roxanne, because she is always good for a laugh, or a jaw dropping story, or when you need to break out into song.

Me: The truth is, Roxanne, I haven't had a boyfriend in a long time because I am not good at it.
Roxy: Yeah, me either. My last two boyfriends were an alcoholic and then a drug dealer. But I miss the money and the jewelry.

thoughts on this week

-I am in love with my new Crossfit coach. He is handsome and his voice is hoarse from yelling encouraging things all the time. Crossfit seems to be what makes me get out of bed every day. I know people always tell you that things are life-changing, but Crossfit saves me so much of the time from being a slave to my flesh. I never want to go but I'm so glad I do, and now I can't picture life without it.

-I am looking forward to my "babymoon" with my best friend in California where I am mostly picturing us lying on the beach and doing nothing for six days.

-I am still trying not to think about life after college, because it is horrifying like a Narnia that is always winter and never Christmas.
It is like an entire CD with songs that have no bridges.
It is like soda with no carbonation.
 And I only have seven weeks left before real life.

But I am keeping my heart wide open. God knows where the good goes.

Mariann and me, well we stopped taking the pills at the same time, and opened our faces wide to a cold December.
To a cold January.
To a cold--well it wasn't that cold but I felt myself waking up to my hands gone numb every morning and I would look over at her and how she could sleep with her mouth closed, and I took the suggested vitamins. Told myself the vitamins made me happier but I still ended up cutting off all of my hair as if to say,
well.

I guess I wanted to say that I was a brand new shiny page in Vogue for her.
That I was something she could hold on to, but she broke up with me, and I don't know if it's about breathing with my mouth open, or if I cooked breakfast in the wrong way, or if I laughed too easily while watching the news, or maybe she liked my hair longer,       or if she didn't need me anymore to be free of the pills all by herself.

She would send me these romantic text messages from time to time, afterwards, and I would stop the car to read them, and breathing would get harder for me. I could smell her there in the car. I would lean over and touch the passenger seat. I would clench the passenger seat and whisper the words you told me would help me, and I wouldn't respond to the messages.

And I became a certified camper and would camp all the nights that I didn't have to work in the morning. I would drive myself drunk into the mountains and set up the tent in the dark, and lay in my thermal sleeping bag, and bite off all the nails that I had left. I'd re-read the messages from her. Save them for good, then delete them for really good, then wish I hadn't deleted them and then
I would conjugate Spanish verbs until I fell asleep. In the morning, I could feel alive because it was really cold.
And that's what I was going to tell you, Sharon.

That even though.


That all of this.


That I still have hope, and that sometimes the hope has nothing to do with her, and I know that's a start.