*

Wow, this used to be an awesome fucking blog.  There is no excuse for what has happened since then.    In a way I was dead and now I am alive again, but didn't realize I was dead at the time.  Like a zombie maybe, or I guess more like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense.  My drive out here to Colorado was like Haley Joel Osment being like "you're dead, yo," but unlike Bruce Willis I had the option to revive.  So I did.

I'm feeling good now.  Real good.  As usual, nothing about my life seems to be following a "plan" that "makes sense", but I get more and more comfortable with that idea as time goes on.  As of right now, this second, at 10:55 am on Februrary 24th 2014, I am totally content.  I want for nothing.  I guess I should want a boyfriend to complete me or something too, so maybe I'll look for that soon.  I've realized though, that people seek out significant others so that they dont have to do stuff by themselves and can bone on a regular basis, and since I like doing stuff by myself and have felt sort of sexually fallow for the past few months, I'm probably good for a while.  Also I'm getting kind of hungry and will need to eat soon.  So yeah, besides THAT i want for nothing.

I'm at the library in what appears to be the World War II section, and am captivated by the following titles:

The Last Train From Hiroshima
Stalin's Folly
D-Day by Steven Ambrose (I just know it's probably good)
Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945, The Years of Extermination

and finally

In The Garden of Beasts (a fat black book with a swastika between the title and the author's name)

Oh and I just noticed My Queer War which is sandwiched between two titles on Nagasaki, so obviously I need to check and see what that's about.

Is it weird that since I arrived in Telluride, I have spent more time in this library than in any public library over the past 20 years combined?  It's sad really--I wasn't raised that way.  When I was 4 and 5 years old my great aunt Mary took me to the downtown public library every weekend, where I would browse in the children's section for hours, as if it were my first time down there.  When the new (it will always be new to me) TR public library opened I was there at least three times a week, doing god knows what for hours on end.  Now look at me.  I don't remember at ALL how the dewey decimal system works.  I don't recognize a single title in the surrounding stacks.  I need Mrs. Armstrong, my elementary school librarian, to come here and re-teach me all of these lapsed skills.

Portland I <3 You

Damn I'm gonna miss portland.  I realized this today.  

It is the dumbest city.  Like, if you could take the concept of a peter pan complex and then express it as a city, that city would be portland.   

But at the same time, it's exactly the city to be in if you have no CLUE what the fuck you are doing.  Every neighborhood is a new chance to be someone else.  I literally have costumes for different areas of town that I keep on hold, in case of wine tastings or house parties or food-cart openings (of which I've been to 3 IN THREE MONTHS).  Black skinny jeans as a base, then vary accessories depending on the location.  All black on Alberta, feathers and pendleton print and shit on Hawthorne, platforms and minimalist tunic in the Pearl, kool hiking  gear anywhere east of Hollywood.  I feel like a complete poseur and fraud everywhere I go, but in the most fun way possible.  I want to yell I NORMALLY JUST WEAR BOOTCUT JEANS STILL and see how many people laugh, thinking I'm being ironic.  I want to ask, are bootcut jeans old enough for me to wear ironically yet?  But then I realize that if you have to ask, they probably arent.  

The way I'm writing this makes it sound like mocking.  It's not.  It's fun and wistful, because I know that this time in my life is almost over.  Not because of some self-enforced age limit or societal declaration, but just...because.  I can feel it.  I'm starting to get over it, the way you get over Power Rangers or Tiger Beat magazine or clubs.  I noticed it most acutely over Memorial Day weekend, when I met up with my some of my dearest and most hard-drinking study abroad friends.  We still put away an abnormal amount of alcohol, but there were no kegstands, no broken furniture.  In the morning we all took vitamins.  In the afternoon we went to the gym.   I'm starting to settle, in the best possible way. 

And I know that all my life I'll have friends who DON'T grow out of this phase--friends back home, friends I leave here.  For that I am grateful, because I'll always have a way to revisit this time in my life.  But for me personally it's almost over.  It feels like the right kind of destiny. 

I wrote this like a month or so ago and forgot to publish it

Well I went over to tumblr for a while, but that sucked so I'm back over here.

Yeah so dear diary I'm in clinic and I'm graduating in 4.5 months but currently have no patients so I feel like this is the most productive thing I could be doing even though I'm sure there are actually a million other more productive things.

Also I live on a houseboat now and have an adopted duck family who I feed bread out my bedroom window?  What is happening?

I'm in a weird place (as usual) but it's not a bad place.  Transient (as usual) but not lost.  I should be moving to the Denver area at the beginning of the year, with a layover in Telluride to hang out with Emily for a couple of weeks or so and take a little break. I'm so excited and not really nervous at all--I mostly just want to be finished with school FOREVER.  I don't have a plan, I don't have a job lined up--I'm just gonna work at the best place I find, ideally in the middle of nowhere.  Can't wait to leave the city, and I'm not even IN the city, and it's barely a city by NY/LA/ATL standards.

*

I'm in the midst of my typical post-get-together blues, wherein I am depressed for 2-4 days following time spent with my best friends and/or family.  I hate that I feel like this--I have managed to develop solid friendships with a number of people here and genuinely enjoy my life, but these relationships tend to feel relatively hollow compared to the people I just left.  It feels ungrateful, or stubborn or something, as if I'm actively preventing myself from forming deeper bonds with newer people because I know I have this other, permanent safety net of communication and understanding. 

At the same time though, everyone I know right now--everyone--will be gone in a year.  We will be scattered across the country/planet exactly the way we were before we first met.  And I 'll be starting over once more, probably in a new city, possibly (but hopefully not) still far away from my safety net.  I've always prided myself on being a solitary ship in the night, but as I get older it starts to get harder.  I have a feeling like maybe I'd like to settle somewhere more permanently, but at the same time I haven't the first clue where I want to go.  I feel lonesome for the first time (but not lonely, I feel like there's a difference)--like I can't talk about what I'm feeling because I honestly don't know how.  There's no way to connect.  It feels flat, and melancholy. 

 

     

i guess im crazy now

   There is something about being in school that makes you feel as though you are standing in one place doing nothing for 4 years, when in actuality you are accomplishing a lot, I guess. My friend Anna and I were semi-joking the other day about how depressing a graph of our day-to-day lives would be, and then after we were done semi-joking I launched into a full fledged not-joking investigation of what this graph would look like.  After some intense self-reflection that took about 3 minutes, I made an actual color-coded pie chart of my daily thought processes.  Oh god, is this how I entertain myself now?  It's been raining for 6 weeks (out of 36)!!  I have an actual "raincoat" board on Pinterest dedicated to raincoats!!! I HAVE A PINTEREST!!!! AHHHHHHHHH  

 

 

WOOOooooo

Just got this email from my newest patient--I was actually frustrated and kind of bummed after her visit because I couldn't get her thoracics to move the way I wanted and was feeling all fail-y. I don't think she has any idea what this email meant to me. Total BUZZ.

Also...

this was a nice, gross little moment I had on twitter today.