rocky mountain heart

There's this smell and feeling of camping from when I was a kid that I try to recreate sometimes.
It happens especially in October.

The air comes through the window, a little cold but not menacing, and you can close your eyes and think you're in a tent, and think the world is yours, and think that you're alone but safe, and hear a fire crackling somewhere and that your parents love you and that you have a raincoat that you can put on that is four different colors and sneakers with Velcro and that when you get out there, there are pine cones and dirt and that this is real happiness with your family, and Poptarts, and it took so long to drive here and you can dry your sneakers on the fire if they get wet and the air smells only like conifers.

Right now I've got the window open and I can feel the rain coming in and--

I'm behind on all my homework from being lazy.
I'm behind on all my friendships from being sick.

But I feel safe and loved and safe for a minute.

song and dance

"STILL...two or more drinks a day do increase your chances of getting drunk."
-Megan

"They were playing Franz Ferdinand in every store. I was so proud of the mall."
-Izzy

----------------

Some days, the best that you do is to get furious, and then cool down with a third cup of coffee, and not say anything irrational.

To take a win or two where you can get them.

And one glass of wine and a call to your Judy at bedtime.

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.

the sins of a hermit


I lived without a phone for a few days this week. I killed it early Monday morning and went without it for the rest of that day. I renewed my contract with my cell service provider and they sent out a new phone, but it didn't get here until basically last night. But that's not the point of this story.

I dug up my old orange enV and got it to run enough to look at all the old things I had saved on it from two and a half years ago. All the memories came back with the saved text messages and things I'd written in my notepad. It was like a diary.

I smirked to myself that the most romantic relationship I've had in four years was my imaginary one with MK. I wrote this, when I was 19, and I'm sharing it because it is ridiculous. "I mostly figured that we were both looking at each other, in love, and that one day he would take me in his arms, and I'd be all tan and have long hair, and he'd say "This isn't going to work" but I think that when he is like, 40, and I'm also a middle-aged and famous writer after several marriages, we will bump into each other on the street in Chicago or LA or Cleveland and the age difference won't be so severe. It will be true love then, my darling."

I think I have been living on too steady a diet of Jenny Lewis, since I was sixteen. And now when I see MK smoking a cigarette at the U, or walking with other students, I still think he's a genius, but my heart doesn't stir. And perhaps he will never get interviewed by Doug Fabrizio either.

Tomorrow is my last day of living here and sleeping in all the time, and taking my meals alone and looking out over the beautiful golf course. I will miss this hideout. It would be very easy
to
become
a
recluse.

And now, the tragic short story of Rebecca.

I have all my classes with this girl, (and by all I mean both.) and I always noticed that she dressed really nice, and reminded me vaguely of Celisse because she has long dark hair and wore the same clothes that Celisse does. I think there is probably proof somewhere that you are attracted to people who look like people you already like. But one day, she ended up in a group with me to discuss Against Nature and I told her I thought her heels were really cute, and asked her where she got them. (Which, apparently is tacky? according to In Style magazine, which is really depressing to me, because I love to know where people got their clothes, if they're cute.) But maybe she doesn't read In Style, because she told me. And the next few classes I had with her, she would come and sit right next to me, and I would smile and say "hi" and she would just nod at me. The whole time, I would be thinking, is she looking at my shoes? Crap, I always wear Vans. Or, is she laughing at the same jokes Professor M.P. is telling? I was enamored with her because I thought I would finally have a friend, and that she would force me to wear cuter clothes to impress her.
But one fateful day, (actually it might have been that same week) she followed me into the bathroom and pushed me up against the wall and told me she would kill me if I told anyone wear she got her shoes. Just kidding. She picked the stall next to me, (when there were 6 other stalls to choose from) and I definitely couldn't pee after that, so I washed my hands and left really quickly, and it's been weird ever since.

We ignored each other for a very long time after that. I made a different friend that I can chat with, and even the twins will turn around to talk to me. But Rebecca and I would just cordially smile at each other.
But today, she sat down next to me and I turned and smiled at her, and I wondered, if the weird bathroom thing had never happened, we might have been best friends. Maybe she watches all the TV shows I do. Maybe she would have asked me out for coffee.

But I guess I'll never know. And I'm forced to be fine with that. Unless she is going to be an English major for as many years as I will be, and then we may reconcile with the gift of amnesia that time gives to college students...

I want so badly to be here.

School makes time go by so quickly. It's wonderful. I finished a 6 page paper tonight that is probably mostly garbage. Probably I will get notes back like, "There is no analysis here, you are simply putting the quotes in your own words." or "This is not what Hegel means when he says The Idea or Spirit." But I didn't decide to be an English major to write really analytical papers. It's mostly because I wanted to get a degree for reading a lot of books, and enhancing my knowledge of what has gone on in the world in the last 2000 years.
And if I write better fiction in the future, that's a plus.

But about the time. I have spent the majority of the last week by myself, mostly, doing homework, which was really enjoyable. But I feel that now is the time I get to hang out with different friends besides Liz Lemon and Blair Waldorf.

It's fall break after I finish my theory midterm tomorrow. I think I'm going to indulge in some Thai food, and hopefully it will be cold outside, and I will play Nintendo on the bus.

Life is good.

I'm surprised you can't remember me

I'm working this week at THE TOWER. I can't remember the real name of the building, but I can see the whole valley because we are working on the last floor before the top, and it is breathtaking. If I got to work on this floor for good...I would never leave Utah. You can see beyond the petty. You can see beyond the traffic. There isn't a view of any religious buildings, only architecture and trees, and glittering state street that fades gradually into the distance. It feels like it could be in the rest of America.

I love to rub shoulders with The Suits. Ride elevators with people who just nod. They don't try to make small talk and I love the silence. The food court is full of fancy people in perfect clothes; almost impossible to picture them in a backyard barbecue holding a beer and flipping burgers. I let my eyes flutter shut and try not to ask them who's fitted shirt they are wearing, or more importantly to me, who's scent they are wearing.

It might sound materialistic. It might sound outrageous. But I wake up every morning and I feel so pampered to become part of the people in the world who work
NINE
TO
FIVE.
Spoiled. Grateful.

And it makes me want to be a hot shot someday.

When we were younger, there was a good 6 to 8 months that we ate these soybean patties for many meals a week. I don't know why we had so many of them.
We were poor.
We tried to come up with new ways to use the patties. Cutting them up and tried to disguise them in other foods, to add protein and stuff.

It's not like we're rich these days. But there are a lot of things I'm realizing now that I wish I could have told 14, 15, 16, 17 year old Rachel were going to happen, and the lessons I would learn. But I don't think it would have been worth it, if I didn't learn them for myself. What I'm saying is, I couldn't have foreseen the trips to California, and Mexico. The rich people I've spent time with, the sushi and cocktails, the dresses I've worn, the handsome men who've tried to convince me of...anything they wanted to convince me of. A lot of worthless worldly things, that are still good for experience-sake, but looked more glamorous during adolescence.

I wish I could tell my 21 year old self the values I will know by 25. But I think that is why I have awesome friends with good advice.

Ben Dory's dad was J.D.

He still is. He was like, uncle J.D. to me back then, though. He was really cool. My dad would make fun of him, because he had a ponytail. But they were the same age, and I think J.D. wore a leather jacket. But for sure I know he had a ponytail and rode a motorcycle. I remember him giving us rides on the motorcycle at probably midnight. Or it felt like midnight when you're five.
And once, he took Ben and I to his work with him, where he made robots, and one of them started moving towards us while he was in the bathroom and we fuhreaked out.

J.D.'s still married to Lisa, the feminist. Ben's mom. She would let her leg hair grow out and bleach it. Which seems like more work to me then shaving. But one time, she drank some coke on the beach, and a bee was in the coke can, and she got stung.

She cleaned both my mouth, and Ben's mouth out for saying Shut Up to the dog next door. She's a good mom.

I'm pretty nervous to ever leave my room.
9 days left of hell.

beautiful scandalous night

I was once a tired blonde waitress feeding three kids on my own. I was an old man driving a semi and knowing America. I was a secretary, a mistress sitting in an empty hotel room, being sent flowers and thinking sex was love. I was a 47-year-old surgeon cutting corners. I was once a lawyer looking out the window on the 13th floor and thinking I'd go back to Omaha one day.
And when I was done being all of these things you met me right where I was, and my heart was clean
like
bleach
white;
a young lady, cold but not unhappy.

You've been good to me.