A little

Well, I was going to stay stuff about funny stuff,
but then I ended up saving it for a story where it will get tucked away on a shelf, and when I die in a few weeks (I always think I'm just about to die) it won't get read for a year or two until my family can handle to start reading all of the sappy stories I've written. Or, if I live, it will go in the arsenal.

And, an aside on my fiction-writing:
I read a piece this week for my final Creative Writing workshop, and when class was over, my new friend Marc said, "It was good, a bit like your other piece though, in that, she was so lonely," and I knew he was right, and I stewed for a few hours over whether or not I keep writing the same character over again. And here's what has happened to me.


a) I re-read No one Belongs Here More than You by Miranda July at Christmas time, and what I realized I knew and loved about her writing, was that deep-seated loneliness that every human being has(man or woman, teenager or fifty-year-old business man) almost all of the days of their lives, and how she shows that without really saying it


b) I started to believe it is a fact that every single person, whether married or slave, or divorced, or perpetually single (ME), or homeless guy, or Prime Minister, or alien from outer space... they are suppressing the loneliness (not necessarily a libido all the time, Sigmund) and that this loneliness is the hole that God wants to fill.


c) Maybe we do all feel the loneliness, but some of us definitely don't admit to it. Or either way, I started writing stories about this same girl who lives alone, surrounded by people, and I don't even necessarily think she is me. I'm just trying to take care of her. But I need to write a couple old man stories, maybe, for Marc, so he thinks I'm just not writing the same white-girl story over and over.


So now that that's over, here are some of the other things that have been happening to me.

I clumsily spilled an entire venti coffee on a really sweet guy one week ago, and I've never been so embarrassed in my life. And you know, dear friend, how little I use the superlatives. I tried to think of my top five most embarrassing moments, but none came close to this.

I took Ceramics 1 twice in highschool. The second time was with my best friend Kelsea, and one day, after walking out of the bathroom and all the way to Ceramics, and then in and out of the storage room, and then sitting down, our teacher said,
"Kelsea, does Rachel know she has toilet paper sticking out of the back of her pants?" because he was never sure what things we were doing on purpose, and I'm pretty sure most of my teachers thought I did drugs.
And Kelsea said, "I doubt it," or something, and then came and whispered it to me, and while my face turned bright red, this did not even come close to the bright red burns that were probably on this guy's thighs when I drenched them in coffee. And then he tried to tip me, which made it worse.


Besides that, I finished college.

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.

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.

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.