4 Years

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

-Emily Dickinson

Poetry Corner Sunday Night

Selecting a Reader

Ted Kooser


First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moments of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having enough money for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses and there
in the bookstore she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.

Bye Bye, Baby

Taffy Margoshes

July 14, 1999 - August 26, 2015

Treemail

The other day, my friend Howard sent me a link to an article about how the city of Melbourne, Australia has assigned ID numbers and email addresses to every tree within city limits. Though residents are meant to use these to report broken branches and other arboreal hazards, instead they are writing love letters to their favorite trees.

When You Give a Tree an Email Address from The Atlantic
Trees Returning Emails from Broadsheet Melbourne

My tree

This makes me happier than I can even begin to express. If you ever needed proof (and who doesn't, these days?) that the world is a miraculous place and that people are caring and genuine and creative and curious, this is it. Not only are Melburnians professing their love for and posing questions to their most beloved trees, but the trees (via some very patient, good-humored employees of the city) are actually writing back. How could you not want to run outside and throw your arms around the first spindly sapling or ancient, knotted oak that you see?

Aglow in the warmth of my sudden and unexpected pride for humanity, it occurred to me that I might be able to find my tree--a lone, stalwart spotted gum inside the looped walking path in Royal Park. I spent hours under the sweet-smelling canopy of this tree, reading and writing and playing guitar, missing home, never wanting to go home again. What if I could find it--pick it out of a map of more than 70,000 trees--and let it know what it meant to me? I think that would make it very happy.

So I found it. First with Google Maps...

...then with the Melbourne Urban Forest Visual.

(And if your heart doesn't just spill all over the floor at the words "Email this tree," you should have some tests done to make sure you have a heart.)

Naturally, after locating my favorite tree in the world, I felt a bit of anxiety as to how I would go about initiating contact with it. You see, I've never emailed a tree before and I wanted to make a good impression. At some point during the excitement, I realized that I would probably spend the rest of my day--which I had specifically set aside to tackle the more pressing issues in my life--writing and rewriting a letter to a tree. As soon as I unearth my list of reasons why I will die alone, I'll be sure to add this to it.

It took me a few days, but I wrote it. Tomorrow morning I'll read it again--after all, one's first email to a tree is nothing to take lightly--and when I'm satisfied that my spotted gum will appreciate the sentiments I will  click "Email this tree."

I hope my words will mean something.

Wait, We Just Had a World Cup?

I know soccer isn't for everyone. While being forced to watch a Sounders game with me a couple years ago, my friend Scott declared the sport "ass-numbingly dull" and proceeded to groan every time the ball would switch directions after not being scored. Some games are less exciting than others. I get it. I do. But after the US women won the World Cup this past weekend in Vancouver, I received excited phone calls and texts from six different people who ordinarily have as little to do with soccer as they possibly can. This game broke scoring records and viewership records. It's going to inspire a whole new generation of empowered female athletes. It's a big deal.

And so, I bring you my ten favorite story lines/moments of and about this year's tournament.


10. Helen Mirren narrates a recap of the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup, set to Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends.

9. A dog after my own heart.

8. Nigeria fights back twice to tie heavily favored Sweden. (I am also a sucker for a good underdog. And the Nigerian fans. So adorable.)

7. President Obama's phone call to the US women after their victory. My favorite part in the video was when he asked, "And Carli Lloyd, what have you been eating?" Coolest president ever.

6. This delightful, amazing video clip in which Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers defend women's sports. I love when Amy finishes with, "And no more tweeting, Benoit. You're too dumb."

5. When the US women fell to Japan on penalties in the 2011 World Cup final, Japanese midfielder Aya Miyama made a point of seeking out every American player she could find and hugging them while her teammates shrieked and leapt in celebration in the middle of the field. Her country had just won the World Cup for the first time in its history, and right on the heels of the tragic tsunami. This year, when the US defeated Japan in the rematch, American midfielder Shannon Boxx found Miyama and returned the favor.

4. Carli Lloyd, Abby Wambach, Megan Rapinoe, 'Nuff said.

3. This recap of Carli Lloyd's breathtaking third goal of the final. I have no clue what they're saying, but, incredibly, I know exactly what they're saying. It's glorious. (Oh, and the goal's not too shabby either.)

2. The overwhelming fan support for England's Laura Bassett after giving up a game-winning own goal in the dying moments of the semifinal match against Japan. I cried when I watched her, inconsolable, after the final whistle blew. I cried when, in her first interview after the game, she said she wished no one knew her name. And I cried during the player procession of the third-place game against Germany, when fans waved "Proud of Bassett" posters high above their heads. Her one mistake ended England's storybook run at the World Cup, but she will still be welcomed home as  a hero. Sometimes people are pretty great.

1. Oh yeah: WE WON!

A Jumble

Some recent thoughts:

1. I think I have fleas.

2. It is 972 degrees in my house.

3. I was in an alarming mood one day a couple weeks ago and chose to spend my evening watching YouTube videos of soccer players dying on the pitch. Even more horrifying (if you can believe that there could be something more horrifying) was the fact that I had only typed "soccer player" into the YouTube search bar when the autofill finished with "dies on field."

4. I am currently in a cafe, and the man at the table next to me is in the midst of a full-on business crisis. He has been on the phone with numerous people (he is now taking a call from Betsy), frantically trying to get a hold of Sharon. This Sharon is quite elusive, let me tell you. Even the magic words, "This is an emergency, Kyle, have her call me" don't seem to produce the desired effect. He is now pacing worriedly through Teen Non-Fiction and I'm pretty sure I just saw him turn down the Romance aisle on purpose. Ooh, something is happening in court. Or on court. He could very well mean a tennis court. Or a racquetball court. I have no idea. And there is a man on the other side of the cafe who looks like Walter White from Breaking Bad.

5. I don't need experience to be an "Experienced Naturopath," do I? Or I could be a "Line Cook II" at the Gold Mountain Golf Course in Bremerton. No! I could be an instructor with Dizzy's Tumblebus! That sounds exciting and dangerous.

6. I just found a Craigslist ad for a restaurant in Ballard looking for a prep cook with no experience necessary. On the right-hand side of the page, where they post the caveats of the job, they list "contract job," "internship," "non-profit organization," and, most puzzling and delightful of all, "telecommuting okay."

7. It took me a full 20 minutes, much of which was spent staring at the bookshelf next to me, to realize that the Religion section has been replaced with Humor. I saw a Dave Barry book and rather than think, "Huh, I wonder if someone misshelved this," I thought, "I didn't know he wrote religion." Even seeing the titles "SRSLY, WTF?" and "The Zombie Survival Guide" did nothing to tip me off. I like to think that some minuscule part of my brain registered that something was amiss, but it certainly didn't tell me. t think it was eventually the Archie comics, on the top shelf, that naturally drew my gaze upward to the giant "HUMOR" sign above the shelving unit. Oh my god, and the comfy chairs are gone! What is happening to this place?

Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

The Order of the Day

Billy Collins

A morning after a week of rain
and the sun shot down through the branches
into the tall, bare windows.

The brindled cat rolled over on his back,
and I could hear you in the kitchen
grinding coffee beans into a powder.

Everything seemed especially vivid
because I knew we were all going to die,
first the cat, then you, then me,

then somewhat later the liquefied sun
was the order I was envisioning.
But then again, you never really know.

The cat had a fiercely healthy look,
his coat so bristling and electric
I wondered what you had been feeding him

and what you had been feeding me
as I turned a corner
and beheld you out there on the sunny deck

lost in exercise, running in place,
knees lifted high, skin glistening--
and that toothy, immortal-looking smile of yours.

Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

My choice for this week's Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Damn-Well-Please is not a poem per se, but an excerpt from The World to Come by Dara Horn. I find it rhythmic and gorgeous and heartbreaking--everything I love in a poem. And who's to say it's not?

"There is a moment that has happened over and over again, in every place children have ever slept, on every dark night for the past ten thousand years, that almost everyone who was once a child will forever remember. It happens when you are being tucked into bed, on a dark and frightening night when the sounds of the nighttime outside our drowned out only by the far more frightening sounds in your head. You have already gone to bed, have tried to go to bed, but because of whatever sounds you hear in your head you have failed to go to bed, and someone much older than you, someone so old that you cannot even imagine yourself ever becoming that old, has come to sit beside you and make sure you fall asleep. But the moment that everyone who was once a child will remember is not the story the unfathomably old person tells you, or the lullaby he sings for you, but rather the moment right after the story or song has ended. You are lying there with your eyes closed, not sleeping just yet but noticing that the sounds inside your head seem to have vanished, and you know, through closed eyes, that the person beside you thinks that you are asleep and is simply watching you. In that fraction of an instant between when that person stops singing and when that person decides to rise from the bed and disappear--a tiny rehearsal, though you do not yet know it, of what will eventually happen for good--time holds still, and you can feel, through your closed eyes, how that person, watching your still, small face in the darkness, has suddenly realized that you are the reason his life matters. And Sara would give her right leg and her left just to live through that moment one more time" (118).

And a second excerpt from the same book, thrown in for good measure:

"Of course, beyond the cave stood an entire world of years. Indigo years, yellow years, orange years, years that blossomed like roses and years that froze like snow and years that dissolved like sand, weeks that rooted themselves and grew and rose and towered out of the earth, and months and months of hard pebble days that bit into sensitive soles and callused them for good. There were times Sara could never have dreamed of--looming pink cliffs of seasons that had to be scaled on their faces or climbed on treacherous paths, roaring iridescent cataracts of entire decades thrown over the edge, vague yellow dunes of sleeping hours, sudden eclipses of nightmares. A few weeks were hard shining apples, or thick bread. One year, her first, was pure white milk. And there were tiny instants, fractions of a second--glances, touches, kisses, sounds, words--that flooded over the time around them, raging, surging with churning currents, and washing entire years away" (246).

Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

Ocean

Pablo Neruda

Body purer than a wave,
salt that washes the line,
and the luminous bird
flying without roots.

Lessons from Travel: What NOT to Do

Another article up, if anyone is interested!
(Casey, I think you'll enjoy this. And happy anniversary! I love you.)

Lessons from Travel: What NOT to Do

Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

Answers

Mary Oliver

If I envy anyone it must be
My grandmother in a long ago
Green summer, who hurried
Between kitchen and orchard on small
Uneducated feet, and took easily
All shining fruits into her eager hands.

That summer I hurried too, wakened
To books and music and circling philosophies.
I sat in the kitchen sorting through volumes of answers
That could not solve the mystery of the trees.

My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles.
Smiling, in faulty grammar,
She praised my fortune and urged my lofty career.
So to please her I studied--but I will remember always
How she poured confusion out, how she cooled and labeled
All the wild sauces of the brimming year.

I Want to Go to There

I miss this place so much.

Why Isn't the Whole World Like This?

This story. I just...I am so in love with this story!

Vienna Introduces New, Same-Sex Themed Crosswalk Signals

Poetry Corner Monday

The Great American Poem

Billy Collins

If this were a novel,
it would begin with a character,
a man alone on a southbound train
or a young girl on a swing by a farmhouse.

And as the pages turned, you would be told
that it was morning or the dead of night,
and I, the narrator, would describe
for you the miscellaneous clouds over the farmhouse

and what the man was wearing on the train
right down to his red tartan scarf,
and the hat he tossed onto the rack above his head,
as well as the cows sliding past his window.

Eventually--one can only read so fast--
you would learn either that the train was bearing
the man back to the place of his birth
or that he was headed into the vast unknown,

and you might just tolerate all of this
as you waited patiently for shots to ring out
in a ravine where the man was hiding
or for a tall, raven-haired woman to appear in a doorway.

But this is a poem,
and the only characters here are you and I,
alone in an imaginary room
which will disappear after a few more lines,

leaving us no time to point guns at one another
or toss all our clothes into a roaring fireplace.
I ask you: who needs the man on the train
and who cares what his black valise contains?

We have something better than all this turbulence
lurching toward some ruinous conclusion.
I mean the sound that we will hear
as soon as I stop writing and put down this pen.

I once heard someone compare it
to the sound of crickets in a field of wheat
or, more faintly, just the wind
over that field stirring things that we will never see.

Look, I Actually Wrote Something

Check out my article on TasteTablet!

My Advice: Say Yes

Poetry Corner Monday

Splitting an Order

Ted Kooser

I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half,
maybe an ordinary cold roast beef on whole wheat bread,
no pickles or onions, keeping his shaky hands steady
by placing his forearms firm on the edge of the table
and using both hands, the left to hold the sandwich in place,
and the right to cut it surely, corner to corner,
observing his progress through glasses that moments before
he wiped with his napkin, and then to see him lift half
onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring,
and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife
while she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon,
her knife, and her fork in their proper places,
then smooths the starched white napkin over her knees
and meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him.


A Meeting after Many Years

Ted Kooser

Our words were a few colorful leaves
afloat on a very old silence,
the kind with a terrifying undertow,
and we stood right at its edge,
wrapping ourselves in our own arms
because of the chill, and with old voices
called back and forth across all those years
until we could bear it no longer,
and turned from each other,
and walked away into our countries.

Hello, Future

A few years ago I wrote a post about some of the most glorious job postings I found while searching the bowels of the internet for employment. Back by popular demand (by which I mean I'm the majority of my own readership and I demanded it), here is an updated list. It should be noted that while only some of these are writing-related, all of them were found under the search terms "writer" and "writing."

Paleo Writer for Holistic Acne Blog
I have no clue what this means, but I find it imperative to hold this position!

Hose Crimper
I accidentally closed out of the tab right after I saw the posting, and since I didn't remember the exact title of the job I had to start a new search with the word "hose." And this wasn't even the first one.

Cannabis and Basketball site needs writers
I just love that this is one site.

Recreational Budtender at Grass
How much would you give to be able to say, "Yes, I tend bud recreationally."

Senior Program Officer, Enteric & Diarrheal Diseases Job
I'll take the part before the comma.

Merchandiser at Specialty Store Services
This one included the following: "[Job] requires tearing covers from magazines and throwing the body of the magazines into the proper trash/recycle receptacle."

Journeyman Plumber
I smell a children's book.

Summer nanny in Sammamish
I have taken the liberty of bolding my favorite parts of this job description: "Christian family looking for energetic nanny to keep 10 & 12 y.o. kids active outdoors over summer...Both children have food allergies (gluten, dairy, egg, oranges, pineapple, sunshine)...Ability to teach skateboarding and break-dancing a bonus but not required...Prefer someone interested in outdoors, nature, bugs, salamanders, frogs, hiking, biking, etc." Additional note (from me): I definitely think the thing to do with children who are allergic to sunshine is to force them to stay outside for the entire summer.

That's all I've got for now. I'll keep (both of) you posted on which of the above jobs I choose as my future career. Fingers crossed for Diarrhea Officer.

All About That Book

I think my heart is about to explode all over the floor.

Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

Happy National Poetry Month, everybody!


Awakening

Robert Bly


We are approaching sleep: the chestnut blossoms in the mind
Mingle with thoughts of pain
And the long roots of barley, bitterness
As of the oak roots staining the water dark
In Louisiana, the wet streets soaked with rain
And sodden blossoms; out of this
We have come, a tunnel softly hurtling into darkness.

The storm is coming. The small farmhouse in Minnesota
Is hardly strong enough for the wind.
Darkness, darkness in grass, darkness in trees.
Even the water in wells trembles.
Bodies give off darkness, and chrysanthemums
Are dark, and horses, who are bearing great loads of hay
To the deep barns where the dark air is moving from corners.

Lincoln's statue, and the traffic. From the long past
Into the long present
A bird, forgotten in these troubles, warbling,
As the great wheel turns around, grinding
The living in water.
Washing, continual washing, in water now stained
With blossoms and rotting logs,
Cries, half-muffled, from beneath the earth, the living awakened
                                                                       at last like the dead.

Poetry Corner Monday

Immortality

Sandra Beasley

Face it: I will never

appear on the flipside of a nickel,

or as a balloon floating down Fifth Avenue;

no one will give my name to a variety of rosebush,

or a way to throw fastballs, or a beetle

with four strange, silvery wings.

They say my spit's helixes will swim in the children

of my children but that's nothing more

than a simple whip graft, the way

a pear tree is bullied into fruit. My heart

is one yellow marble waiting in a swarm of yellow marbles,

waiting for someone to chalk lines of play, waiting

for the thumb of God. Inertia

is a poor man's immortality. Even

the ancient recipes have failed us now--

no more gilded eyelids or canonic jars, no more

baklava baking in the crypt

of my jaw. Call me

selfish, but who doesn't dream

of being both kites and wind, boat and ocean?

I want to be the ball and the bat and the mound

and the sweat and the grass. 

I want to be the vampire who drinks

a tall cool glass of me so he can live forever.

The Gorillas Are Trying to Kill Me

I'm being hunted by flies. And I'm not just talking your average everyday grotesque-but-reasonably-sized housefly. These things are mammoths. They're the size of my thumb nail (and I have giant thumbs) and they sound like weed whackers even from across the room. If Jeremy from Sports Night were to see these beasts, he would deduce that they have some sort of stealth capabilities. And they're following me everywhere. They're on my bedside table when I wake up, dead in mounds on my windowsill when I lift the blinds. They dot the white ceiling like demonic winged stars in an inverted night sky.

One gorilla fly, or approximately
seven normal flies stuck together.

The weather has been uncommonly gorgeous for the past few days, so I've thrown open the windows and doors and welcomed in the fresh, warm air. Unfortunately this also means welcoming in the flies. When I was leaving the house this morning for the library, I passed through the mudroom and glanced briefly into the laundry room as I opened the back door. To my absolute horror, there were literally hundreds of these massive gorilla flies--also known as "the gorillas"--flat up against the windows. Now, I do not mean "literally" like, oh, 75% of the American population when they say inaccurate things like "My heart was literally beating out of my chest" or "I was literally dying of laughter." I mean it in the way it's meant to used. There were literally hundreds of gorillas, and they all wanted to kill me.

Because I couldn't stand the thought of these creatures enjoying the inside of my house for the duration of my errand, I did what I do every summer when we get an infestation of fruit flies: I pulled out the vacuum. Having added the extra-long hose and two stiff plastic tubes to the end, I held the contraption in front of me, like a light saber or Inigo Montoya's sword outside the Pit of Despair, and flipped on the switch. Immediately a thick black plume erupted into the air. Gorillas everywhere. I've never been afraid of flies before--certainly I dislike them immensely and find them to be disgusting nuisances--but at the moment of the Great Gorilla Cloud of 2015, I was legitimately terrified. I actually cowered behind the extension hose in my hand and shut my eyes.

A little slice of hell.

After about fifteen minutes of intense fly demolition, I had cut the population to less than one-tenth what it had been. Satisfied for the moment, I left for the library. I should have known that, while I was away, the flies that remained would call in reinforcements that were even bigger and blacker and nastier than their vacuumed brethren. If the first wave had been gorillas, these were the blue whales of the fly kingdom. I bet they could even breathe underwater.

I know when I've been outsmarted. I lay down the hose and backed slowly into the kitchen, easing the door shut in front of me. I can only imagine what they've done to the laundry room in the hour since. As for me, I intend to never do laundry again. Besides, I'm much too busy cleaning the floor under the dining table, which has become my elderly cat's new favorite litter box.

Best Saturday ever.

So That Happened

1. I'm currently sitting at a table in the cafe of my local bookstore, "looking for jobs." I give this phrase the safety of quotation marks because I find I'm much less hard on myself for failing to accomplish tasks I've arbitrarily encased in quotes. And also because, as I get weirdly self-conscious looking for employment in public, what I'm doing right now could hardly be construed as seeking employment in any logical way.

My usual seat next to the wall is occupied, so I'm out here in the open next to the New Science Fiction section. I feel exposed and vulnerable, like I'm presenting myself for the Red Carpet Fashion Police. Except instead of judging my ensemble, the ghost of Joan Rivers is directing her raspy, snide remarks toward the fact that I'm contemplating a job listing for a male bilingual case aide when I am neither male nor bilingual (nor, for that matter, a case aide).

Every time I sense someone coming up behind me I switch my internet tab to npr.org to make myself look smart and not at all unemployed. I must seriously rethink this approach. I just frantically minimized Craigslist and the NPR headline on the page behind it was "Haunted Dolls are a Thing, and They're Not Cheap, Either." Good, Margoshes. Excellent. Because nothing says "I'm a stable human being" quite like pretending to read articles about wind-up dolls. I bet every person in this bookstore just saw my computer screen and is thinking, "What an intellectual, well-rounded adult female she is. She's sure got her finger on the pulse of this nation's problems. Now there's someone who is definitely not looking for a job."


2. As I sat there, "looking for a job," I overheard a young man at the cafe counter ordering his lunch. "Can I have the broccoli cheddar soup?" he asked. The barista asked how many crackers he would like, which I found an odd question but evidently the customer did not. "Three packets," he said, pausing a moment before adding, "I was going to reply with something esoteric like, 'As many as will fit into a baby's hand,' but I thought that might be weird." The barista laughed. "And can I get a drip coffee, too?" the man asked. "What size?" the barista answered. "Enough to fit in a baby's hand?"


3. [From early February] I think I may be losing my mind, and not in the I-put-six-socks-in-the-washing-machine-and-only-five-came-out kind of way. I mean that for the past two weeks, the only thing I've wanted to do is sit on my bedroom floor, hunched uncomfortably over a jigsaw puzzle while listening to NPR stories I've already heard. Sometimes this Rockwellian scene includes a steaming mug of tea, but most of the time it's just me, Robert Siegel of All Things Considered, and a puzzle of Moscow's onion domes in the dead of night, where half the picture is entirely black and all the pieces are the exact same shape.


4. For Christmas/my birthday, my friend gave me a five-year, one-sentence-a-day journal. Each page is dated at the top and has five groups of lines with enough space for you to fill in the year and summarize your day in a single sentence. A few nights ago I decided to read back through what I've written so far. On March 10th, I was mopey and depressed and contemplating the merits of spending the rest of my life in a cave I would dig in the backyard. One day later, after hours spent painting trim in the kitchen, I wrote "In case the issue ever arises again, remember that paint is NOT an adequate substitute for caulk." Between this and monitoring the popularity of our country's haunted dolls, I'm really tackling the hard-hitting issues over here. You're welcome, everybody.

Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

If I Wanted a Boat

Mary Oliver
(from Blue Horses, 2014)

I would want a boat, if I wanted a
boat, that bounded hard on the waves,
that didn't know starboard from port
and wouldn't learn, that welcomed
dolphins and headed straight for the
whales, that, when rocks were close,
would slide in for a touch or two,
that wouldn't keep land in sight and
went fast, that leaped into the spray.
What kind of life is it always to plan
and do, to promise and finish, to wish
for the near and the safe? Yes, by the
heavens, if I wanted a boat I would want
a boat I couldn't steer.

Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

My God

Sandra Beasley

My god is a short god. My god wears jeans.
When he swims, he has a lazy breaststroke.
When he gardens, he uses his bare hands.
My god watches reruns of late night talk shows.
My god could levitate but prefers the stairs
and if available, the fireman's pole. My god
loves bacon. My god's afraid of sharks.
My god thinks the only way to define a country
is with water. My god thinks eventually,
we will come around on ear candling. My god
spits chaw. My god never flosses.
My god reads Proust. My god never
graduated. He smiles when astronauts reach
zero gravity and say My god, My god.
My god is knitting one very big sweater.
My god is teaching his terrier to beg.
My god didn't mean for icebergs. My god
didn't mean for machetes. Sometimes
a sparrow lands in the the hands of my god
and he cups it, gently. It never wants to leave
and so, it never notices that even if it tried
my god has too good a grip, my god, my god.

I'm Alive! Sort of.

Greetings to my twos of readers! No, thine eyes do not deceive you: I have returned from my non-Amish blog Rumschpringe and have so little to report of the experience that I wonder how the hell I've been writing actual content here for so long. Two posts in three months--one of which was a poem written by someone else? Good work, Margoshes. But what's that, you say? I've never looked better? You're too kind.

I've had better days, though; I suppose I should start with that. I miss Orcas immensely. I wake each morning feeling like I've just taken a seat at a table in a junior high school cafeteria, only to have everyone stand up and leave all at once. I feel left behind in so many ways that sometimes I honestly wonder if everyone else is living in fast-forward while I'm still adjusting the tracking on the screen of my life. My friends have amazing jobs that they love. They're getting married and having babies, and I'm going to sleep every night in the same bed in the room in the house that I slept in when I was five. I flip through the pages of my National Geographic and pray that by the time I have the resources to travel again, the places I want to see will still be there. It's hard not to feel like a failure.

Normally, to snap out of this, I would take photographs. I would play the guitar and sing and write poetry about waking up in the middle of a windstorm. But ever since I got home in October all the light and the music has seeped right out of me. When I sit down to write, I tell myself that there's nothing I could possibly say that someone hasn't already said. I think, sometimes, that even my inner monologues are plagiarized.

Maybe--hopefully--this will be the week when my meager job qualifications are enough to qualify me for something I actually want to be doing. Maybe this unseasonably warm January will turn arctic and I can walk down the street at night in the snow and not hear my own footsteps.

Maybe I'll think of something that no one's ever thought of before.