katie

i could be worried that lady gaga lyrics are starting to apply to me. or i could take it as a sign that i am living life right.

i just found this email i wrote hannah october 4th, 2006: six days before i dropped out of school. i love this email. it was at the PEAK of my sickness at school, and it is the most clear i have maybe ever been about that time. note the breakup suggestion! and the already knowing that the past wasn't perfect!
the subject line of the email was "start on the inside and work your way out."



i need to give myself some more goddamn credit.

dear journal,
last night i could not find my diva cup ANYWHERE. i tore my house apart looking for it. i stomped around and my muscles were all tense and i was angry and sad. i was really, really sad. my stomach hurt i was so sad. i went to bed freezing and furious and bleeding profusely. i wore, just so you know, dear journal, a reusable cloth pad. it is purple and has moons on it. are you surprised? silly journal. i was not. hippie women love purple and moons. they seriously drool; literally SALIVATE when they see that combination of design elements. so they like to put them near their vaginas. whatever, i had one that i bought once BEFORE i found my perfect except now it's lost diva cup. i seriously flipped the fuck out. i watched two episodes of flight of the conchords to calm down, and then there was/is some kind of animal living in our home thati was too afraid to look for in case it was rabid. i think it is a family of skunks. it has definitely taken up residence in the wall between my room and the kitchen. it is loud and scratches things and it sounds like it has a small collection of plastic and foil items for entertainment purposes. its, not mine.
anyway. i came to work today cranky and bleeding into my purple moon pad. it is actually CALLED a luna pad, which means moon in european. WOW. and then LORI, whom i was housesitting for, asked me discreetly if i was missing anything. my eyes widened, like my cervix widens to release babies and/or blood. SHE FOUND THE DIVA CUP! it had rolled out of my bag onto the floor of her car THREE WEEKS AGO when we went to a poetry reading together. and then she went out of town. and she just found it, and she found it JUST IN TIME! oh my gosh. i am SO HAPPY, journal!
purple moons,
katie

if i have children i want to raise them in a small town. maybe iowa, or montana, or beautiful utah. we will be unafraid of a neverending sky.

 this book of essays on women who wrote Beat i am reading actually smells like old cigarettes. 
i got really sad tonight and quickly surrounded myself with feathers to stifle the impact. i am still sad but the buffer was effective and i feel like the things around me are unrelentingly beautiful. i feel like my feet hit the bottom of the pool and i have doubled over and sprung upwards again. by which i simply mean i'm more enchanted with the smell of this book, and the way reading about Beats makes me feel, and the beautiful title of this entry, stolen from diane di prima, and the timing and content of kendra's pictures and posting, than i am with the dimensions of my sadness. 

i have learned new words lately, and am collecting them in a binder:
lacunae
eponymous
corbies
mim
sophistry (i thought i knew this and didn't. i had to look it up to understand this essay.  it is DECEIVING intelligence, not real intelligence. thank you, Helen Adam.) 
meme
doggerel

and others.

now is one of the times i really wish i were dating someone, because we have these new aprons in my office that are v-necked and really sexy and i basically want to take erotic pictures in them and i have no one to send the pictures to or wear the apron for when i get home.

time to let some of this out.

i had a flawless weekend in the bay area over labor day with lissa. i keep saying flawless to describe it so that i don't get caught using "amazing!" "wonderful!" "awesome!". over the course of the entire weekend, until i saw a living thing get hit by a car going 85 mph, literally nothing went wrong. and even that was in that long stretch of the 5 corridor that is nowhere. so while i was in the bay, shall we say, it was flawless.
the weekend started with kendra in santa cruz. traffic getting out of town was awful because the 5 goes directly through the angeles forest, which, lo and behold, is burning in the largest fire in los angeles county history. we didn't get to kendra until 1:30 in the morning, after a three and a half hour drive took six hours. we fell directly asleep after just enough time to shriek when we saw the moon (blindingly, electrically white after weeks of burnt, hazy orange) and revel in the cold ocean air. the next day we woke up early and headed to the tiny, parking-lot farmer's market. we admired a bike with a patsy cline cassette strapped to its seat. none of the bikes looked to be locked. we ate fresh fritattas with mango granola pancakes and home fries, lissa ate pizza, and kendra bought a plum and a bar of peruvian chili chocolate. then to the coast, where we walked along the beach, stepping lightly for the decaying sea lions (the smell was pervasive. i wanted to study it, to pick it apart, but it got into my throat and made my eyes water.) every time the wind blew the smell the other way, i would bend to look at the skulls, and the tiny connecting cord into the spine. the birds eat everything but the thin layer of fur and the leathery flippers. makes for a very interesting molt.
now to the boardwalk. we bought dipped cones and rode the roller coaster once, the rickety wooden one that shocked all of us with how fast and frightening it actually was. we laughed and screamed the whole way, finding it hilarious that none of us knew what we were in for. we ate the supernaturally-fast-melting soft serve out on the sand, sitting for just enough time that lissa and i got badly sunburnt and were sore for the rest of the weekend. we didn't feel the heat because we were close to the water, watching the eery cloud layer in the far distance that must have been over san francisco. it looked like the ship in independence day that hangs over each of the large cities. (i think of that scene every time i am in downtown los angeles and see the US Bank building. google it and you'll know.) we ended the afternoon on the ucsc campus, learning kendra's home for the next seven years, talking about fear and school, marriage, growing up, faithfulness to oneself, what kind of animal made the poop that we all had to avoid while climbing the tree where we sat. my guess is raccoon.
then out of santa cruz, leaving kendra and her little town and her small, cozy side house and the smiths playing in her car (she's going through a phase because she currently lives on morrissey blvd), and into pleasanton. my aunt, cousin, and step-cousin were all there. the cousins i see once every five years or so, so this was extraordinary. danny was lovier than i have ever known him; rubbing my back when i stood in front of him, squeezing me whenever he was close. we ate a four-course meal (salmon with homemade shallot butter, farmer's market fruit salad, green beans, ravioli) and rolled to bed tipsy and happy. the next day was san francisco. i had written a ten-point to do list, which we stuck to fairly faithfully, and acheived all but the castro district visit- one neighborhood that i have never knowingly seen in san fran in my many trips there. lissa loved it. i watched her face carefully when we climbed to the top of windy lombard street, telling her not to turn around until we got to the tippy top, and photgraphed her in the moment when she saw the city sprawled in front of her for the first time, with the wind behind us and the sun exploding onto the cars and our arms and the buildings below. we ate at house of nanking in chinatown, a vegan asian fusion place in the tenderloin, and arguably the best pizza in san francisco in the haight. like i said earlier, everything went seamlessly. the buses came, the bart was not packed, our sense of direction was infallible, the restaurants and bookstores and parks we wanted sprang up in front of us without our having to hunt. i bought two cds at the haight-asbury amoeba; the new jenny owen youngs for 4.99 and patti smith's easter for 6.99 or so. i bought the former because i love her voice and i think my art and my fashion sense are being tugged in her aesthetic direction, and the latter because the cover picture looks like me the way i think of myself. also because it has rock n roll nigger and because the night on it. also because i saw patti smith last week and was underwhelmed because the crowd was not into it, patti was sick, and the acoustics were terrible. she was much better three years ago at the bite of oregon. anyway. lissa and i ended the night by hanging out with danny and gina at danny's house, which is actually my (ex) uncle art's house. art and i have not seen each other in at least fifteen years. he has reason to be alienated from my family, but he asked me to come sit on the couch with him while the kids stayed in the smoky back room and watched the princess bride and discuessed the masonic cult. we talked for at least half an hour, and i found myself loving him at the end of it. i guess that's how family sometimes goes, especially when i know danny loves him and i never saw personally any of the things i was supposed to be hating him for. we got back to pleasanton on the last bart train, our car entirely empty, at 1:30 and fell asleep.
the final day we headed north to berkeley, where we met up with nick sherrow-groves for lunch on an incredible whim. i have known nick since age 12- we did our most important, arguably, but certainly most awkward growing up together at ICS. he has just gotten back from traveling for a year on his watson fellowship, and has hunkered down to a year-long program at cal. it was fantastic to see him. he has mellowed out, as has sara. he is less pushy and just more mature. i love running into pieces of home everywhere. that's what this whole weekend ended up being about. i was cocooned by loved ones everywhere i wanted to go. how terrifically lucky am i? the end of the day was in oakland, with my los angeles housemate alana, who was born and raised there. we were fed baked quinoa with green chiles and jack cheese, asparagus, bruschetta and peach cake. we drank cold water. alana drove us to the bart station late and kissed me goodbye; she returns to the southland tomorrow night. we did not get on the road until ten, reaching los angeles after 3. my eyes itch from the lack of sleep and the rapid-fire air changes, but i don't feel too distinctly sleep-deprived.
then there was the dead animal. i was looking forward and there was a small explosion in front of the car in front of me, and sparks flew under the car. i said out loud "whoa..." and looked for more sparks. about four seconds later this smell slammed into my car, this smell like shit, fur, blood, cow, dust, grass, rot. it got into everything, i couldn't get it out of my face, and i realized what i had seen. the explosion was an animal, and the sparks were actually bits of effluence being flung into my headlights, glistening. explosion is an accurate word. it was exponentially more disturbing than hitting that pomeranian going 20 miles an hour, even though it still died and i still killed it. but it was not torn apart. i do still remember the blood coming out from between the police officer's latex gloves, though. the two accidents shared a thought in my mind, which was something along the lines of  "this is because people are here. this is because roads cut through everything anymore so people can traverse their all-important journeys as quickly as possible. animals try to walk the same ways as always but suddenly there is lethal, shining metal hurtling by through parts of the path. this should not have happened." the car that hit this creature in front of me did not even pause. its brake lights did not even flicker.
lissa spent that night with me, and did not come over last night. i spent the time alone in the house (oakland and korea being the respective locations of my vincent family) doing laundry and watching "the illusionist." eating totally inappropriate dinner foods with no nutritional value. baking banana bread without bananas. i also talked to my mom on the phone for 40 minutes or so. tonight i am picking up yet another book from the library, hopefully finishing "drinking the rain," and reading some more of the mao biography. i'm really not into that book. it's taken me two weeks to read 80 pages. it might pick up once he's actually in power, but for now i just find it implausible and sort of flighty in the way it's written. i also don't like "drinking the rain" very much, although it is my mom's story almost to a T. that's probably why i don't like it; because my mom is living it and it seems extravagant to sell it as a memoir. it is doused in privelege. here is a funny story about that book, though: the author, alix kates shurman, mentions a friend of hers named katherine who lives in new york in the 90's and is a high-octane feminist. i immediately thought to myself  "this is Katherine Spillar, the editor of Ms. (and my former boss.)" and it TOTALLY WAS. a few pages later it mentions that she works for a women's magazine. first, i felt uber-smart for recognizing her from one little sentence about her clothing and personality and politics. second, how cool is it that i worked with women who are famous and in memoirs and such things? very. it is is very cool.

this afternoon my boss is coming back after a three-month leave of absence. she left immediately and somewhat shockingly. she left her car on campus and disappeared from her house. she has not been in contact with anyone. her daughter flew in from new york and did not see her. i pass her house every night going home and have been hoping simply that she was alive. perhaps that is dramatic, but it felt that serious. she emailed me while i was in china and left work three days later. three or so times she has forwarded me emails relating to work. i made her a card and marie cleaned her office and i decorated her whiteboard. i will be very, very glad to see her. that cannot be exaggerated.

mostly i am swimming. i am 23 years old and have found myself surrounded with people i adore frankly and purely. by my own luck or charm i exist in a cluster of multi-talented, multi-intelligenced, creative, hilarious, compassionate, ambitious, fast-moving, forward-looking, clear-eyed people. this weekend handed that knowledge to me with a platter and spoon. (sans head of baptist). for awhile longer i will float on it. eventually i'll sink below it, as i am wont to do, and who isn't, really, when surrounded by fortune so big it has to be taken for granted or it grows combustible. i feel fairly combustible lately. i feel that if a torch were held close to me, touched to my hair or set in the crook of my elbow, or if a car approached me at 85 miles an hour, i would spin apart and fling myself into your headlights, shining.

 i did not stay up all night last night. but now it is finally morning and i am still awake. i thought so. i thought that urge was in me. 

 i guess i'm about to stay up all night and that hasn't happened in a long, long time. i'm sort of excited. 

Los Angeles is burning. The flames are visible, the sky is brown. My housemates and I have evacuation housing ready, and yesterday I categorized my belongings into "Save" and "Don't save." The things I would save: my cat, my typewriter, my computer, the ice cream maker, my art supplies, a handful of books, whatever clothes I  could grab, my pillow, Winnie the Pooh, the bowl Kate made me, a few photographs and Laura's painting. It won't come to that, but as I lay in  bed last night I was quietly excited at the prospect of cleaning the slate. In my heart I was longing for disaster.

we find ourselves in summer, which has come to mean, in recent years, that i find myself losing people. a middle school friend died a week before my birthday of a heroin overdose. his memorial was the 28th, and i'm sure it was beautiful. his family is religious and bathed in light.

and then this morning my grandma died, my mom's mom. i will be home for the party this weekend, celebrating and mourning.
see you in seattle.

 i am back in california and things have calmed down. i turned 23. i told ben i loved him. a middle and high school friend died, tragically and excruciatingly after a heroin overdose. this has given me perspective on my ecstatic birthday. my phone rang off the hook and facebook filled up, and i wore cowboy boots to our party that turned out to be sort of a dud. i wasn't worried, all my favorite people were there. but lisa spent potentially hundreds of dollars on it (actually her parents did; it was her present) and no one showed up until 12:30am. i went to bed at 1:30, the last of the actual residents of the house where the party was hosted to do so, while it was still in full swing in the backyard. before i fell asleep i found out about ryan. his brother shares my birthday, and wrote a note on facebook where he tagged himself and ryan. ryan is dead and cannot check, of course. but their sister posted the note and it showed up on my newsfeed, and just like that, this summer became another one where tragedy looms. my other grandpa, (as in not the one that died three years ago) died in january, but the memorial was this summer and it's sort of wrapping itself around me now in a way it hadn't before. mostly it's just strange. he died three days after he was hospitalized, similarly to my mom's dad, who hid his illness until it killed him, quickly and without pause. the newly-dead grandpa was discovered in his bathroom by my aunt, covered in vomit and crumpled on the floor. and so that piece of information enters the world for the first time. 

i've been alone for most of the weekend, which has been nice and surprising and sad. melanie was supposed to come up from san diego, melly that i have not seen it at least five years, melly who was my best pen pal through adolescence. our letters are full of first cars, homecoming, driver's ed, first kisses, the plays i was in, crushes, and summer plans. her handwriting was beautiful cursive and mine was loopy and messier. even thinking about them now, i think of peaches (she lived on peach tree lane, i believe. or maybe it was peachtree city, GA) and bright, hot sunlight. i think of high school. and then i am back to thinking about how that cannot be returned to, and ryan has just died. 

anyway. melanie got called into work at the last minute, and can't come. suddenly this very busy weekend has emptied and i have read an entire book (belle du jour- intimate adventures of a london call girl) and started another (stephen king- the stand, uncut, all 1000+ pages of it, my second try after one summer in middle school). i like being alone, but i haven't gotten my act together to buy rubber cement or fishing line, so my art projects are on hold and i am literally just sitting around, taking walks, listening to and downloading music, reading, and making ice cream with my new ice cream maker. i am going to start a blog soon about the new flavors i will try, hopefully one a week at least during the summer. yesterday was french vanilla, and it turned out perfectly. next will be watermelon basil, i think. with laura, on tuesday night. 

annie and i are headed home next weekend for the enormous BBQ party my mom is throwing. i have a feeling it will be the most time i spend with annie since before i left. she moved out three days after i left, in with her friend lauren. she promptly bought a dog and forgot beezer, who peed everywhere and got fleas again. sigh. i miss her. she is always partying or having her picture taken naked, or else nannying and playing with her dog. i am glad to have my room back, but i liked sleeping next to her, i liked coming home to her on the couch. i liked taco bell. ah well. that was a few months of closeness, at the expense of privacy and art. now i am stretching out again, feeling creative. this has much more to do with my time in portland and how freeing it was than with annie taking up too much of my space, but i do think that having creative energy gets hampered sometimes when your areas are encroached upon. i know it does, in fact. 

the weather right now is perfect. it's sunny and warm, but there are finally some clouds in the sky so it's not brutal, and the breeze is nice. i just opened the windows after trying to keep them closed and covered. right now it is hotter in the house than out of it. i went to the unitarian church this morning and was sort of disappointed. the sermon was about "women's wisdom," which i thought i would either love or comically disagree with, but then it played it too safe to be either. a middle-aged congregation member sang songs she wrote about women, in the style of my fourth grade teacher who became, and might still be, a recording artist somewhere in the south after she taught me about the solar system. simple songs about mothers, with neo-feminist principles, ie:
she learned her charms from her mother
oh, mother
but she thinks for herself
women, women...

you know the type. anyway, it was not very political at all, and the reverend kept saying things like "this strikes me as a post-feminist thought. what we need is not total equality, necessarily, but a round-table discussion of world leaders. we need more balance" blah blah blah. post-feminism. ha. post-colonial. HA. i laugh in the face of "post-." i write my thesis in the face of "post-", more accurately. 

no one seems to be answering their phones, so i've stopped trying. i sort of wish i had gone out in the world to find a perfect place to read all day, but then i wouldn't have washed dishes or done laundry. i forgot it's hot enough here that i don't use the dryer, which is fun. i'm finally trying to sell my bike on craigslist. finally put the china pictures on my computer, which means the next time i am mellow and moody and have hours, i will put them online. i like getting chores done. 

my grandmother (the only viable one i have left, i see suddenly) sent me a card that i found really wonderful. it was the simplest thing she has ever sent me, and it means perhaps the most. the front of the card says, in italic blue lettering, surrounded by four hearts colored in pastels and tied with silver, reflective string: let me tell you a story about the perfect granddaughter...
and the inside says only: once upon a time, there was you. The End. 
under it, in her beautiful script that does not show her age (87 on june 5th), she wrote: and you were perfect. love- grandma margaret. 

right over the string of the single purple balloon on the inside. included was a check for $23. 
when she tells me i'm perfect, i believe it. 

last night was a pretty big night, if i let it get that way.
i spent a couple hours with sophie. we really only had time to go to a party leah fishbein was throwing and then go home. the conversation had little time to be anything but superficial. and yet, scratching the surface is better than not speaking, or speaking angrily, or any of the things we did at whitman. sophie's hair is very, very long and wavy. she looks beautiful and calm. she has not, contrary to her rigidly held, constant belief, gained weight. i'm excited to be her friend now that i can hold my own with her. i'm excited not to be a timid girlfriend. which brings me to my next and more momentous time last night.
there is no ramp onto the 205 from I-5 north, so it took me two hours to get home last night when it should have taken me 30 minutes. in the two hours, before i had even left portland, i decided to go to ben's old house because it is close to sophie's. if i had not gone, i would have thought about it the whole way home and wondered what it looked like, and if i remembered how to get there. so i tried to find it. this was at LEAST 40 minutes of driving. i thought i could just rely on sense memory, but there was one turn i forgot about having to take. i went every possible direction through this four-way stop, even though i was SURE it was a left (it was, ultimately.)  finally i noticed that one way i had previously gone was not a dead end if i turned right instead of left on this little side road. as soon as i took it, i was on ben's street. i didn't even have time to think about it. i was there, and it looks different because the woman (friday? wednesday? her name is a day) living there now has bright, new-agey curtains and baubles all over the place.  this is about as anti- ben's parents as i can imagine getting. now, let us together prepare for a huge delve into katie's life in the summer of 2006.
by the time i got off the freeway, i would be really, really nervous. this never went away, no matter how long we had been dating by that point. my stomach would be churning. i would be excited, but mostly nervous. feeling pretty nauseated because, let's be honest, i've been nervous since i crossed the river and entered oregon. i'm wondering if we're going to have sex. i'm wondering if i am actually in love with ben. i'm wondering why i am so sad all the time. i'm missing my grandpa and all the half a dozen other people in my family that have died in the last month. (the only time i drove to ben's regularly was during the summer, which means no matter when it was grandpa would have just died, along with every every every one else.)  i'm tired. i was always tired. this was the summer i stopped eating and sleeping, and threw up at least twice every single week of my life. i wish this were an exaggeration, but it's not. 
i'm scared of being alone with ben, of doing the right things, of being pretty and sexy enough. i'm looking forward to laying on his bed for hours, which is indeed how we spent that entire summer with few exceptions. i'm worried about what i will look like the first second he sees me. will i be in the car? getting out of the car? should i be on the phone, to look busy and exciting? (this is usually what i decided on. i would call my mom to tell her i got there, and dawdle to keep her on the phone until he answered the door, or i let myself in.) hair up or down, sunglasses on or off, strap on or off shoulder, do i smell good? chapstick? 
i can entirely promise you he had no idea. he loved me and wanted to have sex no matter what i looked like. usually he was playing guitar hero anyway and i let myself into the house. 
here is a secret. one night, i got in really late, close to 11 when ben got off work at target. i brushed my teeth and got in my pajamas and got into bed and started reading. i heard his car pull in, and i decided that i would be most beautiful if i pretended to have fallen asleep reading. that way i could fan my hair out and leave my lips parted. the entire time i heard him come through the garage, then the kitchen, then the hallway, i was thinking "i can still change my mind and be awake. i hope i look pretty." and i was feeling nervous and scared and excited, like always. then he came in, and saw me, and went back to the bathroom to brush his teeth quickly. when he came back he turned the light off and took my book away and got into bed. i decided to wake up around the time he put his hand on my stomach. it was important to sound a little sleepy, but also to be properly excited. i touched his face and kissed him. we were having sex probably within four minutes of the lights being turned out. i didn't actually see his face until the next morning. i probably didn't fall asleep that night. 
of course it doesn't make any sense for me to have fallen asleep that quickly. he and i spoke ten minutes before he left target to get home, and i was just about to his house. this means i would have had to get there, get ready for bed, and read enough to fall asleep all in about 20 minutes. at this point in my life, it was taking me on average two-three hours to fall asleep, if i was going to sleep at all. but, it was most beautiful. 
another secret. one day ben went to get his passport picture taken for his study abroad application. i had done mine a week or so earlier, in bellevue. i had just taken a shower and was making an english muffin. i saw the car pull in, and arranged myself with one leg bent, reaching for the toaster, when the door opened. i stretched my neck gracefully. it was ben's mom that came through the door, and she screamed. she thought i had gone with ben and was expecting the house to be empty. i was wearing a towel. i had seriously considered dropping it at the last minute so i was naked when he came in, and this is the time i was glad that i chose otherwise.  i burned my hand on the top of the toaster. 
then there was the time i surprised him for thanksgiving, and his parents and i were in on it together and he thought i couldn't make it. or the time we got back from the roadtrip with sophie and jessica and i was dehydrated and sprawled on the couch. we had just just just started sleeping together, and five days without doing it was hard. he put his hands on my ribs and kissed my breast through my shirt. there was a ring where his mouth had been and he had to stand in front of me or i had to casually keep my hand there while we told his parents about the trip until it dried. it dried quickly, that was the summer it was 102 degrees several days in a row. 
i thought, while driving by, back out of the cul de sac past the house, how the window i could just barely see past the roses is where we had sex for the first time. i thought of what the basement looks like, how it is cooler and we had to be quiet when we slept there because it is next to his parents. i thought of how much of my life had been lived in that house, in that one little room on the side. i wished i could tell that katie (the one in this picture. the very one.)  that things would work out, that she wasn't going to be sad forever. i would tell her that she gets to be beautiful for real later. i would tell her that i still arrange myself in aesthetically pleasing ways every once in awhile, to be seen. i thought of my car parked next to the rose bush, the same car i was driving past it now. i thought of the way the house smells, where the vitamins were kept, that time i put a takeout container with metal in the microwave and it set on fire. i told myself i was sorry. i told ben i was sorry that he dated a shell. i told myself i was sorry for having the most intense love of my life be during a time when i couldn't look in mirrors. i forgave ben for not knowing what to do with me. i forgave myself for ruining my body for three years. i forgave kate for being the life force he needed, because i had none for months at a time. i apologized to us both for months that were wasted. i forgave us both for not knowing any better. i drove home and was asleep before i hit the bed. 

tonight driving back from erin's i felt electric. there was a moment during dinner where i suddenly felt deeply claustrophobic, and thought it was a panic attack. it passed. i thought how i didn't really want to come back to my dad's house, and kate was on a date, and i didn't know what to do with myself for the rest of the day. but then it was much later than i thought it was, so that i just got back this minute and am going right to bed. it was raining tonight- portland has not gotten the memo about summer. i hate driving in the rain, and really hate it at night. really REALLY hate it when it's the first day i've used my car in a month and i don't know the windy back country roads and i'm taking all the turns WAY too fast and there are cops everywhere. 
i don't feel manic. that's not it. i just felt static all around. see my user picture? i feel like i look like that right now. there are no solid lines. there was weird music on my ipod, and i was so wrapped up in thinking about a mix cd to make that i missed my exit, which i never do. i get distracted while i'm driving, but not that badly. i yelled at myself out loud. i called myself kathryn elizabeth. my goal for tomorrow morning is to sleep in until 8:00. i think that's aiming a little high. it will probably be in the 6 or 7:00 hours. but i keep going to bed later and later too. last night by this time i could not finish a sentence. the night before that i was sound asleep and annie called me and woke me up, and i didn't remember anything that we said in the conversation the next day. oops, i forgot to call her today. i was at erin's for 8 hours. it was hilarious for almost the entire time. i made one innapropriate joke about a dead grandma, because it was actually erin's dead (somewhat recently) grandma, but other than that it was golden. my dad met her parents, we ate all homemade food, most of it grown where we were eating it, we watched airplane. one of the subtitle options is like a VH1 popup video version, where through the entire movie little production secrets come up the whole time- ALL MOVIES SHOULD HAVE THIS FEATURE. it multiplied the funny by at least 8. example: during a very early scene where the plane drives through a window into the airport, a bubble points up and says "woman tossing baby..." and there is, indeed, a very small woman in the corner flipping the fuck out and throwing a pink bundle directly into harm's way. and so on and so forth. karl was there, and jesse lord's mom was there also. i find with whitman reunions, when it rains it pours. this happened yesterday as well. i saw six whitman people in as many hours. and in china, where i found myself seeing hongngoc, chantal, erin, stazi and avi. and that was in CHINA. 
i still can't believe i'm in portland now and a month has passed since i've been here. here's a funny thing: my hair was SO BIG in the humidity in china that i could't even flatten it enough to notice that it is growing out. now it has finally calmed down enough, and conversed with conditioner enough, that i can see there is like TWO INCHES of brown hair now showing. i literally had been able to see NONE abroad. who knew. i have the potential for jew-fro. 
buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

i am back from china. i slept in an hour and a half more today than i did yesterday, which is great. 6:00 is a much more reasonable time to be awake. soon i will be a human being again.
i am totally, totally happy. this is the rare, rare happiness that doesn't turn to mania while my back is turned, or while i'm staring at the sky or my bed or desk, or one million pretty things. i am just happy. i am at kate and lissa's house right now. i am sometimes still startled and uncomfortable having two of my best friends be related, but what it adds up to is just being explosively in love when i am in this house. they make portland safe for me, they brought me back to life in this city and gave me someone(s) new to make memories with that were not alone or with ben. 
ben and i are friends again. we started talking on the phone a few months ago, and would talk for an hour and laugh and understand each other. we saw each other twice before i left for china. he was the last person i saw, and the first person i saw outside of family. all times were wonderful, we were both relieved. it's hard, albeit necessary, work to carry around resentment for more than a year. we lied and humiliated and cheated and did all of those things people in love do to each other when they are out of love but have to fill the empty space with something. now we are finally friends. we like each other. we hug extensively. 
sophie left a message on my phone. i am excited to return it. another leap forward. hopefully better than china's. sophie is better than useless dangerous steel production. 
TODAY i am going to erin's house to have dinner, braid hair, knit, and reintegrate into her family that i love. i was just with erin every day for a month, and, naturally, we are having withdrawal symptoms. i wrote the last mass email about china yesterday morning around 5, and she responded immediately because she, too, is jet-lagged and awake. we woke up at exactly the same time. that made me absurdly happy. yesterday morning i watched "the devil wears prada," made myself two breakfasts, talked to my sissy, read some book, tried to sleep. failed. masturbated. tried to sleep again. failed again. got up for real and got dressed and watched the sunrise. sunrises: vastly superior to sunsets. but of course they are. i hate the ends of things and i love the beginnings. i actually love the middles best, but that does not apply in this metaphor. 
i miss china. i still expect to be there every time i blink. on the bus here, first of all it is incredibly expensive. second, you have to push the back doors open yourself, there are always seats available, and you are allowed to leave out the front door. second thru fourth, i guess. there is toilet paper and soap in all bathrooms. there is nary a squat toilet to be found, and you can flush the toilet paper afterwards. everything smells GOOD. this does, however, mean there is no dirt cheap street food for breakfast, no tiny restaurants to stumble into on every single street, no cooking smells everywhere, no stray animals, far fewer adorable children and hugely pregnant women. the first thing i spent american money on was burgerville. yesterday was 7.11 and i consumed four or five slurpees, i lost count. i can't believe i didn't get violently ill. i guess i was eating MSG by the pound in china without realizing it, so my body was not exactly devoid of chemicals for a month. plus the food was probably dirty. mostly i am amazed by my good health. i gained five pounds in china, which brings me to the weight i was in 8th grade, which was the most i have ever weighed. i have finally gained back the 20 pounds i lost when i was sick and dropped out. it only took three years...
i have an essay about bipolar disorder being published at the end of the year in a BOOK. i got paid for it. hence: grown-up writer. swish. 
i also miss hong kong. i wrote about in my emails and my writing journal. the library especially. the water in the harbour, the unparalleled skyline. absurdly, neck-kinkingly tall buildings that i could not take enough photographs of. i miss being at the top of the great wall of china. being in beijing, right south of tian'anmen square. i was misguided in thinking south africa was the revolutionary place to be. the revolution happened inasmuch as it's going to anytime soon, there. CHINA is the place that is terrible and exciting and difficult to understand and live in right now, because it is going through so many changes and clinging to, letting go off, ignoring, confronting, its recent and ancient histories. i would like to keep learning chinese. 
i am fucking starving and i miss los angeles, but not enough to leave the rose city. i will be in the land of bridges one more week. 

 George Tiller was murdered today. Fight on for a woman's (inalienable, unassailable) right to choose.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/us/01tiller.html?_r=1&hp

better, better. today was a wonderful day.  

summer is upon us. here are some pictures from my life.

 sometimes i wonder how much to indulge my mood swings. my problem, if that's what it is, is that i always know when they are happening. i am never swept up entirely. in the car ride on the way home tonight several things happened. i planned the way i would come home and write about them. it would look like this. 

los angeles.

i. we drove past staples center downtown, and there were at least five searchlights up in the air. tonight is a cloudy night, but not overcast. the clouds are fluffy and not stretched thin. it is not going to rain. the searchlights slam across the clouds and disappear in the places where the clouds have disintegrated. i squinted at them every single time, wondering if i would be able to see this one if i looked hard enough, but i never could. i craned my neck even when we had almost passed the 101 junction. i looked in the other cars and no one else was looking. it did seem like just the sort of hallucination i would have, but it was real because annie looked for a minute too. 
...spotlight on me and i'm ready to break...
ii. immediately after that moment there was a series of trees on the side of the freeway that had their trunks wrapped in white christmas lights, and again i thought i might be inventing it. this is something that happens a lot in los angeles and never happens to me in any other city in which i have lived or spent time. this city is the one where i really lost touch, and there are still pockets of that around. i was very sad in portland, and associate that city with a distinct pulling at my heart that feels almost identical to dread. seattle feels like driving to the therapist's office late at night in the rain. it's something like panic, but it is also safety. cape town is giddiness and loneliness and stupidity. hitching rides to school in the country in the world that has the third highest rate of violent crime. listening to "little plastic castle" on the walk to school. 
...all eyes on me in the middle of the ring just like a circus...


and on it would go. that is my mood. i am listening to britney spears for the second day in a row. the play count for this song is rising steadily. and i would write more. i would have to pause for awhile and sit and stare at wall, because those two paragraphs are the only two i thought about on the way home. but then i would keep writing, and that would be the mood. i would stop talking to my sister and i would not do anything fun tonight. i would write, and then i would be depressed and i would go to bed early and clench my fists under the covers. this is not going to be a testimonial where i go do something really great right now. this night is heavy and i'll let it be that much. i will listen to "circus" one more time. and of course i will keep writing in the middle of my mood swings. but i do wonder sometimes. my life would be just as healthy and happy if i didn't ever allow myself to get sucked in. i would even still find things to write about, i think. it's not entirely necessary to be crazy. while i was thinking about the trees with the white lights on their trunks, and then thinking about the totally unique relationship i have with the city of angels,  hunter commented on our silence. i said i was lost in thought, because we were listening to hootie and the blowfish and their music always has this effect on me. which is true. but i spoke. the trance broke and i looked forward under the tunnel to the entrance of the next freeway, away from the various light displays. i still felt strange, but i spoke. i was smiling. and then i realized i can have both. my motherfucking new year's resolution is finally sinking in. 

i'm like the ringleader. i call the shots. 

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