Tuesday, December 31, 2013

My Year in Photos


January
February
March (yes, March!)
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December

Saturday, December 28, 2013

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Two Years

Two years ago today my high school English teacher Prudence Hockley was murdered on the sidewalk in front of her home. I love you, Hockley, and I miss you every day. You made me a thoughtful, perceptive person. You taught me to trust myself and to believe that I had so much to contribute to the world.

Because of you, I am who I am.

Thank you.

Monday, December 23, 2013

A Reflection

Juliet was my best friend in elementary school. She had wild blonde hair and this infectious happiness that was such a presence in itself that I felt utterly desolate and empty whenever she was absent. Jules and I were absolutely inseparable. We auditioned together for our school's annual musicals, made daisy chains and jumped rope, ran cross country. We were the third and fourth legs of our school's relay team and once the bell rang for recess we would sprint to the gym to borrow a baton, spending entire recesses practicing hand-offs on lower field. We timed each other on the fifty-yard dash; crept through the bushes by our classroom when the recess teachers weren't looking and searched for tiny cylinders of colored plastic that we called Indian Beads. We watched The Newsies like girls possessed. Eager to make our marks in the literary world, we co-authored a book called Thanksgiving on Mars, in which a young man is sent into outer space to give thanks among the curious life forms (Puffalumps) of the Red Planet. One summer while blueberry-picking with our moms, we found a sign with an arrow directing people to an unpicked row. We flipped the sign--the most disobedience either of us had ever exhibited--and proceeded to crouch in the blueberries, doubled over with laughter, as one after another people followed the sign into the bramble of blackberry thorns and chest-high grass, not stopping for a moment to consider how very un-blueberry-like their surroundings were. Every fall our families would drive north into the Skagit Valley to the home of a friend who owned a small apple orchard. We would climb up in the trees and jump on the branches, shaking the apples loose onto a giant blue tarp that covered the ground below. We would go for long walks on the tidal flats and race kayaks--me and Jules in one boat and her sister Sara and her friend in the other.

Our birthdays were five days apart and we protected each other and intuited one another's feelings as though we were twins. The only fight we ever had--and to this day have ever had--was when we both auditioned for the same role in our school's production of A Comedy of Errors and one of us got it. After witnessing our quiet, sour moods for an entire afternoon, our teacher, Mr. Watson, pulled us aside. "I've never seen anyone with a friendship like you two have," he said. "Whatever's going on right now, is it really that important?" Of course, it wasn't.

I spent most of yesterday with Juliet at her house baking cookies. Though we live less than five minutes apart, it's been years since we've both been in the same place at the same time. Driving to her home, past the old peacock and llama farm, past our beloved elementary school, made me feel like I had pulled out of the driveway of one home and was pulling into that of another. As kids we spent hours playing in the woods behind her house, picking salmonberries and building forts, pretending we'd been deserted like Karana from Island of the Blue Dolphins, stranded like Brian in Hatchet. We created a make-believe family in her playhouse, played endless games of badminton in her front yard and tetherball in her cousins' (they live next door). We made up routines on the trampoline to our favorite songs. In so many ways, for most of my life her home has been an extension of my own. Both are places of love and laughter; the walls of both will forever ring with every line of The Princess Bride.

Our friendship, though no longer fueled by daily whisperings in class, is an easy, unflappable thing. We are bound by the hikes our families took together, by the dance we choreographed to the version of "Mamma Mia" sung by the ABBA tribute band The A-Teens. We are bound by the laps we ran in P.E. to No Doubt's "Don't Speak." We are bound by those ridiculous inside jokes, the origins of which neither of us will ever remember: "Charles Barkley in a can," addressing each other by the name of Uenheimer Smith, and our puzzling--yet masterful--musical creation entitled "Sour Cream and Happiness." They are small things, trivial to anyone else but the kind of moments that make you fear who you might have grown up to be if you hadn't had them.

It's easy to forget, when someone is so much a part of you, which parts of you are you and which parts are them. After a while, there's no clear delineation anymore. I would argue that in elementary school, Juliet knew be better than even my parents. She was--and continues to be--a calming, encouraging presence, and though she rolls her eyes when I claim to have brought back bell bottoms, she always assuages me with a loving, "Okay, Liv." I am so lucky to have someone who was such a wonderful influence on me in my formative years, and who continues to be a major presence in each consecutive stage of my life. I'm so lucky that of all the friends in the universe, mine are the very best.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Let's Settle This Right Now

As the days inch us ever closer to the new year, I am making a preemptive resolution to look older than twelve. To those of you who say I have a "youthful" face or that one day I'll be glad I look eleven years younger than I am: I appreciate what you're trying to do, but stop it. No, seriously. Stop it right now. I do not particularly enjoy looking prepubescent, and nothing anyone says will make me delighted to appear as though I've just walked in the door from my first day of junior high.

Thinking that my curls make me appear younger, I've tried straightening my hair. I have almost entirely eliminated my forays into the world of people while wearing my beloved sweatshirts and Keds (though if my soul could wear clothes that is exactly what it would wear). While shopping is an activity to which I will put a swift end once I am elected Ruler of the Universe, I have conned my friend Anneka into helping me purchase what I call "big girl" clothes in the hopes that my appearance has everything to do with my wardrobe. So far, I have yet to see proof that this has worked. I just don't get it--the "it" referring to both shopping and my age dilemma.

And so I am asking you, my ones of readers, to be blunt. What's wrong with me? I want to be twenty-six, not sixteen!

Contrary to what many might think, this was not taken last week.
Here I think I actually was twelve. I'm not positive, though. I could have also been SEVEN.
This was senior year of high school. Ellie--the most gorgeous human being on the planet--looks like she's in her mid-twenties. My hair is straight(ish) and it's a black-and-white photo so I look older than I otherwise might, but come on. Sixteen tops.
This was just over a year ago. Michael looks his age, Anneka looks her age. No way do I look older than eighteen.