kittens love other kittens*

Moving is a lot like going on vacation except you have to pack your life into five medium sized boxes, three small boxes, two bags, and a purse. And drive 1,100 miles and step into your childhood bedroom for the first time in a 1.5 years and wonder how you found yourself there.

Moving is a lot like going on vacation because it doesn't feel real.

How long it takes before life feels real again, I don't know. I've only made one real adult move previous to this and that was moving away from here. I never expected to come back.

This voice is sounding a little lost and wavery because we're in the first 24 hours of my arrival. You know the tearing away and settling in is the difficult point. Luckily I have a few great people who've been very expressive of their faith in me because it's much easier to float in the middle of a pond and feel like an empowered documentary filmmaker. Finding yourself in the middle of your adolescent stomping grounds armed with a little digital camera is intimidating.

But here's what I know: I'm a survivor, I'm going to make it, I will survive, keep on surviving.

Also, I've just received some eccentric creative direction for the week. I'm being commissioned with poetry.


Let grow my feisty, curious, loving, and quirky characteristics.


Really.


Start growing.


Now.




I've forgotten what mosquito country is like. I should have put on stronger spray.
*quote from a book I read a two year old today.

some people will play harmonica blues and skype me tout le temps

This shall probably be part of my settling in sound track come 1 August 2011.


So many ideas these last weeks of things to look into documentarily filmmaker-wise. We shall see what I am made of.


I'm singin la, la, la.

letter to past and future and possibly present

Dear,

I'm curling up in bed, unsure of whether I will try sleeping outside tonight, knowing tomorrow morning I will regret not doing yoga now. But whatever, I'll just do some yoga in the morning. Along with everything else I'm putting off tonight. Like talking to what roommates I have left.

I'm tired.

However, I have a lot to say to you. I've been thinking this weekend, about how I had this really important goodbye. Actually, our goodbye was just yesterday but I'm having trouble remembering that because none of what's about to happen in the next two weeks seems real. Especially the part where I move 1,100 miles.

So I had this really important goodbye with a really good friend and I couldn't cry and I've been realizing it's because not only does it not seem real, I cannot see friendship goodbyes as anything more than a temporary or prolonged...no, a prolonged but temporary separation. And it's more than that, it's because if I don't see it as temporary, if I think about permanence and losses and the general negatives of change I will panic. The weight of no longer being able to bike ride up the canyon whenever I feel like it will crush me until I can't breathe. Realizing that I've only had a month of good hiking weather will break my knees and thinking about how I won't be spending a few days every week with my sister and nephew will be enough to make me chicken out.

I can't be a stunted chicken, guys.

Here is where I'm ever pleased for Ecclesiastes, The Byrds, and that afternoon years ago where–after falling into a bout of despondency after several productive, happy days–I realized I will always have periods of down-ness and the thing to do was to appreciate that, get everything I could spiritually, emotionally, and mentally out of being in a rut.

To everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn.

You can't exactly have your cake and eat it too. I mean, I'm learning I can't have all joy at once. At times it is the joy of finding a new recipe, or the baking of a cake, or eating that slice of really good cake. (Don't tell me you're not a cake person, stop eating boxed cake, come over and I'll change your mind.) Sometimes All those things happen in really quick succession, but never all at once, all on top of each other. Everything has its time.

I will continue to write you letters, well, personal letters if you so choose to give me your address. If you call, I'll talk to you but I won't promise to call you. There's email, there's gchat, there's thinking of you.

And there's me in two weeks making the most of the changes in my life.

Take heart! (Oh, take heart, self.)

Forever,

This great uncle is also probably the originator of the family term of endearment: fat head.

He is also the reason I know about the terrible repercussions of polio.

He'd tell me–when pestered on the subject–that my grandma was a wonderful lady, she had to be since she married my grandpa.

image from a collection of

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This is a concise declaration of some things I have been thinking about over the past year.

Similarly, can I tell you one thing about a great uncle of mine? I'd always know it was him calling, even before we had caller i.d., because his gravely voice would shake out, "This is your lover." And every time I'd visit or call he'd ask, "Got any boyfriends besides me?"

people.

summer of my 1994

I read stories hoping for an answer to questions I haven't asked in the past or help in discerning the future.
I put the clean dishes away staring at the pretty hand-me-down dishes from my cousin wondering if I'm really leaving them behind.
I realize how much I miss the prairie and how much I'm going to miss the mountains.
I realize how restless I am.
I'm still as bruised and scratched up this summer as I was when I was seven.
I still fall off rope swings and scar easily.
Nobody swims in sloughs in North Dakota.
I listen to Alanis Morissette or twee; wish I had a boom box so I could tape more Incubus songs off the radio; buy long, flowy skirts at thrift stores and consider buying purple lipstick or making myself some chokers.
Chokers aren't flattering on me.
Wonder if having my hair long again will be the same as the few times before, wonder if I'll actually punch someone this time or just simmer in suspicion and annoyance.
I've never punched anyone.
I'm looking at people differently than I have in the recent past.
I continue to be pleased with growing older and having a greater feeling of joy each successive year. However: mind blown that it's 6 July 2011.
Wasn't it May yesterday? And August the day before that?
There are some things you can't thank people for.