let me stand alone

it's funny how sometimes an evening beginning with grown men in clown pants playing miniature musical instruments can end with a late-night discussion about the loopy broken-lined boundaries that represent marooned lives in the middle east. i'm not politically minded, nor do i desire to be. but it's interesting to me that so many wars have been fought in the name of god because i see god and politics as conflicting ideas, the former being (hopefully) guided by love, while the latter concerns itself with concrete, specific, earthly agenda. i'm not sure you can have a foot in both. it'd be like standing in the caribbean and indian ocean at the same time; you physically can't, and to even get from one to another, you have to take a long trip involving layovers and checkpoints. and it baffles my mind that the world is still building walls and fences all over the place, given our collective history of them. but what interests me more than the boundaries themselves, is how, with the right words they can be turned into these gorgeously heartbreaking things. like anything awful, there's always a poetic element of pain.

i'm reading let me stand alone, the journals of rachel corrie. i love reading journals for the same reason i prefer interviews to be portrayed in the question and answer format in magazines. i always think a person's actual contradictory, fragmented thoughts are always more beautiful than the sterilized summed-up regurgitations that some journalists prefer. rachel corrie is my latest addition to my hypothetical dinner party. she's who i strive to be, minus the whole thinking-the-world-is-a-bad-place thing. she loves the world the way i want to love the world; simply and exquisitely. she tells a story about hitchhiking, where a car pulls over so she runs up to the window and waits for them to roll it down. except they don't. and they don't and they don't and they don't. they don't even look at her. and it becomes this big awkward thing until she follows their gaze and realizes they pulled over to admire a nativity scene in the park across the street. not to give her a ride. and instead of feeling invisible and annoyed, she just feels embarrassed and sheepish. i'm not sure why the story stayed with me, but it really struck me as admirable.

fiction and non-fiction

even though you use the word poem in your poems, you make me want to write them. we are all doing things to be received; formulating spreadsheets, telling jokes, leaning in close to apply cherry bomb lip gloss. i miss feeling like i'm good at something. i miss having people ask about my line breaks. i miss crashing into mary cornish in front of the pears at the co-op and having an impromptu discussion about this thing called love. and i suppose i can use my days more creatively. but i'm afraid to re-develop a taste for poetry, only to have my time ripped off of me like skin again. recycling my grad school applications was the beginning of worst break-up of my life. and the truth is, i don't want to be a writer. except in terms of silly things like this, or the short smattering of words i scribble on random bits of paper. and i'm reading fiction again, which is a start. perhaps i shall join a book group. i just want to incorporate literature back into my life in lots of little ways.

on a positive note, i'm starting to find suburbia refreshing? i went to the spaghetti factory with my mom tonight and brink's home security employees were having their company party. they were all sitting around a long paper place-matted table, wearing navy blue hats and coveralls, eating cheap pasta and cheap beer, and laughing. they were yukking it up like crazy! completely devoid of the usual company party awkwardness, it was obvious they were genuinely enjoying each other. i've been to a few posh/hip/fancy company parties complete with open bar and fancy finger food and never have i - or my friends - enjoyed them. watching these blue collar men and woman, made me crazy happy inside. like, maybe it really is okay to choose something other than becoming a "young professional." maybe it's okay to not think living in seattle proper is worth the money. maybe suburbia can be my new bellingham.