--quotes--

Sheri: I can't even be here. My friend died yesterday.

Me: Oh no! I'm so sorry to hear that. Were you really close?

Sheri: Very close. She was a rich friend, and I keep my rich friends very close.

God can bring me whatever kind of woman he wants. Unless it's a Hungarian girl.

-Bogdan

Watching a boy pull a girl down the street by her hair:

Me: Man, this is the wild west.

Emanuel: Oh this is nothing, sometimes they bring out their swords.

Ashlyn: Wow, you and me are chopped liver!

Me: He only has eyes for Liz.

Liz: I think someone else has his teeth though.

When we were kids, we used to call Coca Cola "water with darkness in it".

-Carla

He's going to come back and throw a mazel tov cocktail through the window.

-Celisse

I think maybe he used to be cute. Maybe they used to have a real arousing marriage, but I don't know."

-Judy talking about really old neighbors

Francisco: Did you miss me yesterday?

Me: Por su puesto!

Francisco: Don't be sarcastic. I know you only like me way way way way way way in the back of your heart.

32 years later and I'm still trying to fall out of love with someone I can't be in love with.
Still wrestling with God.
Still messy and addicted.
Still searching for new things to learn and taste and know.
Still dancing by myself.
Still sleepy.

a lifetime stretched out into Manchester albums--
a girl at the gym with all the other people who can't sleep tonight, running,
a man she still loves after 5 years of sleeping in separate towns.

Sobriety turned out to be less glamorous than we thought, and depression came back in 2017. It ate me alive and it still eats me alive. Mostly it hurts at night. It hurts in my arm, and in my neck and in my ankles, and in my hair, and then my chest is just a cave full of bats. It's a bookcase full of horror novels.  It's a small, small world inside of a---
And then I'm fine in the morning and I show up to work mostly on time.

This week I'm staying in the woods on the mountain and it's really pretty.
I'm grateful for the cold nights and heavy quilts,
for friends and family. For re-reading White Noise by Don DeLillo. For an entire bag of cookies that this lady left for me in the house-in-the-woods. 
Thanking God for m e d i c i n e. Sweet beautiful pharmaceuticals.

Quotes

"I even told this principal that I was in a pickle, and he still hasn't gotten back to me."
-Andrea J.

Watching 13 Reasons Why
Celisse: You can't watch this show buddy, because it's for adults. It's a little spooky.
Wesley: Why? Is it about vampires sucking blood from a man?

"I like my coffee like I like my men. Tall, dark, muscley and rich."
-Shae, at Easter breakfast

"If I got married again, I would walk down the aisle to the Hamilton Soundtrack."
-Celisse

"I did three sports in high school: baseball, basketball and hockey. Wait. I don't know why I just said that, I hate hockey. It was swimming."
-Shawn

I miss what men smell like up close.

“oh god it’s wonderful 
to get out of bed 
and drink too much coffee 
and smoke too many cigarettes 
and love you so much” 
― Frank O'Hara

I wonder if David laid his head on Bathsheba's chest
and thought about the fields
and his sheep
and how much less complicated things were for him back then.

I packed a minimalist-style suitcase, and I'm staying this week (9 days) in North Carolina with Allison and Will and Annie. It's been so beautiful and sunny here while it is snowing at home, and I'm feeling so happy and healthy and lucky. Their house is literally in a forest and the air smells like mountain air when you open the front door.

Last January, I swore I would not spend another January living in Utah, and this is the best compromise I could make. And actually, that's fine because life is just busy.

What I'm trying to soak in, this week, is a lesson in moderation. Allison and Will don't drink brewed coffee, while I normally have 4 - 6 cups per day, and taking a break has been really good for me. I think? I sort of replaced the coffee with about 4 cups of black tea per day.   Because that's what you do when you're an obsessive, neurotic person, in recovery.

Allison has been taking me to her boot camp work outs, and so I'm also perpetually sore. Everything about this just feels like a great way to spend the beginning of the year; working hard, in community, and trying to fast from parts of my regular routine.

Now if there is just a way I can keep doing something like this, every January, I think I can manage to keep living in Utah.

I will look back at this winter and remember it as driving around slowly, in the snowy dark, listening to Malcolm Gladwell read me his books.

And it's beautiful. All of it. I stood in Sprouts the other day with an armful of veggies, and thought, "I can't believe that I'm lucky enough to get up and do this all over again tomorrow." And that is something I've been waiting 20 years to feel again. Dependent on nothing but God's mercy.

"These violent delights have violent ends

And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite:
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow."

Shakespeare

Samson loved Delilah, and let her crush him.
I feel so much stronger than him today.

Thankful for days where the mountains are crystal clear. Thankful for the smell of Lush body wash and early gym workouts. Thankful, so thankful for coffee. Thankful for a couple weeks of sleeping in my own bed. Grateful to watch Ray Donovan, sober. Thankful for my job and rare days with no headaches.

Sometimes I feel like my sobriety is viewed like a cancer by my friends who are normal, and can drink normally. Like they don't know how to act around me, and that I'm more serious than I used to be. 

What I want in this next year of my life is to be as fun, or more fun, than I was when I had alcohol to help my personality. It's more work now, but I feel like I can little-by-little get excited to be alive.

The dreams are scary enough, and my new life is happy enough to keep me whole. 

  

Today's silver lining:

The Dog Didn't Die at the End.

give me my ordinary name

I try to write when I feel sunny.

Some one called me sunny the other day, and I wanted to take that back to the one who called me a dark and stormy person and say--but sometimes I think she was right. I am sunny and I am stormy and I am gonna keep getting through that.

Hiked 10 miles in Big Cottonwood this weekend over Saturday and Sunday and I wanted to bottle up the clean air and take it back to Salt Lake and use it as a balloon to pull me up and over my troubles on Monday morning, but it can't do that. But I do keep fighting. Fighting the unrequited love, fighting the wage gap, fighting the stupid decision to end our daylight at 5 PM. Wrestling with God and for God.

Dog Lake via Butler Fork this weekend with Kenz, and we met up with God at the water.

We also did Bonneville Shoreline for a few miles on the Mt. Olympus leg the next day.
I can't believe the female support system that God has given me.

in my sophomore year at the U, I took this film class about cinema in the developing world. Almost none of the films we watched were in English. I was so tired back then. I worked 40 hours a week, played regularly in a band with Billy and Dan, and took 15 credit hours. I would fall asleep on the train even when I felt unsafe. I kept cans of Slimfast and Clam Chowder in my backpack like a hobo.

Sometimes the films come back to me like a dream, or a memory that belongs to someone else, that I've absorbed. A Mexican child drinking warm Coca Cola. An Iranian man crying about his cow. A Vietnamese guy in an abandoned house in the jungle, with a Volkswagen Beetle parked in the driveway. 

I can't believe how many lives I've lived since then.  The mountains make me feel new. Sobriety makes me feel new. Speckled green eggs and homemade espresso make me feel like a rich lady, and I'm lucky. I'm grateful for all of it.

Everything feels new and more beautiful, and more manageable than a year ago.

where but for the grace of God go I

I'm one week away from 5 months sober.

Everything about my life feels more peaceful than it did. I was able to quit my anxiety medication, and I've gotten my finances on track.

Mostly these days are about working 45 hours a week, doing a bunch of Micro Economics homework, and taking care of people's pets. Drinking lots of sparkling water. Trying to fall out of love. Singing and laughing.

Lots of hope for the future. For a new and important relationship with God. For loving more and more people. For big tent revivals or for the small amounts of blood my heart pumps continually to keep me alive. I see tiny miracles that I didn't see before. I see entanglement; sometimes exhausting and frustrating, but so mysterious and delightful too. What am I that You are mindful of me?

Purity

"Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet."

Purity, Jonathan Franzen

absolute beginners

When I was a teenager, I always wanted to get amnesia somehow.
I thought it would be great to wipe the slate clean and start over. A good way to escape.

Now I'm getting closer to 30, and I feel like I have amnesia all the time. I realized, hanging out with Kelsea the other night, that I've lost most of the memories of high school. This morning I had a brief flashback to one of my classes at the U that was in a building where I never had any other classes, and the teacher was this tiny woman with a child's haircut and a doctorate, who taught me about Frankenstein and I wrote her a ten page paper on Silence of the Lambs.  And then I was sad to learn that I've also lost a lot of the memories of college.

I wonder how much of this was alcohol's gift to me, and how much is just getting older. Dear teenage me; is this what you wanted? It has taken away the sting of old lovers, but also the warmth of time with friends.

I do have so much hope for new memories. Driving to work today, I thought about what Spain or Ireland would be like for sober me. For the hope of new love and new friends and new memories with old friends.

My insomnia used to give me so much anxiety but now I try to look at it like God just wanted to give me more hours in my day than normal people get.