to say i peeled fifty cloves of garlic last weekend would be an understatement. i spent the day canning, or as they say in the county, putting up food, at my old professor's farm in acme. we washed, chopped, blanched, and boiled our way into vast amounts of tomato sauce, pickled jalapenos, and vegetable broth. she showed me her vegetable-dyed silk and her dream pillows, and her little daughter showed me her little dreadlocked doll. she even walked me through her fields and pointed out all of the possible places for my yurt when the time comes.


this is to say, my professor and i are becoming friends. we're transitioning from student and teacher into just two individuals who see insanity and redemption in many of the same things. i've been feeling like salinger felt when he said, i'm sick of just liking people. i wish to god that i could meet somebody that i could respect. i forgot how good feels good to respect somebody, like reallllly respect somebody. it feels like restoration. like opening a long-lost letter from the universe that says: you don't have to walk your walk alone.

on tuesday, in the span of 3 hours, i managed to spill a bottle of sparkling water in my bed, step squarely into my tv dinner, and lock myself out of my room in my towel. also, when i tried to pick up a prescription, the pharmacy told me i was no longer covered under my health insurance. yes, when i let my thoughts paddle furiously upstream, my tangible world tends to fall apart too. and these events snowballed nicely into a full-blown anxiety attack that included treats such as uncontrollable crying, tightening of the chest, and nausea. luckily, it was eventually mellowed out by an obscene amount of olympia genuine draft, the honeyed vocals of sharon jones, and the oddly encouraging words of a friend:

you've got to make your shit work for you.

shit's not working for me at work. the beige file cabinets, the cliched shiny friday donuts, the sheer number of black slacks in the office on any give day, have become too much to take. i've also learned that wills, trusts, collections, leases, prenuptial agreements—they're all the glorified pushing of money from one person to another, and ultimately one and the same. i imagine the attorneys schlepping wheelbarrows overflowing with gold bricks and rubber-banded stacks of cash around the office. everything is transactional, even our verbal exchanges: how-are-you-good-how-are-you.

i got weepy as i explained all of this to an old professor of mine over pumpkin spice lattes. she doesn't think i'm unreasonable for being unable to find redeeming qualities in working at a law firm. (sidenote: she says she often tells her students about her unwavering idealist. that's me!) she also thinks my temptations to go back to the city would be running in the wrong direction; she sees me out in the county. and she's right. for what i care about, i am right now in the perfect place.

and tonight on my walk home from a pizza date, i kind of fell in love with bellingham all over again. as i walked past that big welcome to bellingham sign on state street, i remembered how i used to watch the bay from cold storage's webcam when i lived in seattle, and how i missed the slightly brighter colors, the slightly colder winters, and the exponentially higher quality of life.

(i gave my notice at work. here's to making my shit work for me).

i had a bomb birthday weekend that began with a massage from a sprightly 70-year-old woman who liked to talk about her sex life, followed-up by a day of fun with my mom, and ended at a party in a vancouver mansion with like 50 improvers— and myself. i also treated myself to some beautiful kick-ass towels (see picture) from value village that i will turn into scarves. i am 25 now. this is the first birthday that actually feels different. it feels like, fuck this is it. which is a good motivator to get on with the good things in life. things like following that little thing called bliss. to keep on with e.e. cummings's battle of being nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else. and more than anything, to stay true to my motto of living life as if i had cotton candy in my left hand and a bukowski poem in my right.

i also received a text at 1:20 in the morning that said happy birthday! i love you soo much and i'm pretty sure you know! you're my bestest forever. xoxoxo. it pretty much washed away my loneliness because i realized that as long as i have my core people by my side, i will never be alone, even if none of them are in bellingham. a friend told me that getting married is like saying fuck you to everyone else. i just want to marry my core people for richer and poorer, through sickness and health, through shitty jobs and confusing relationships, and all of our naysayers can go to hell.

the air has turned itself inside out and is making itself known. it's fall! it's mitten and scarf season! it's pumpkin spice latte season! eeeeeee!

on being a bland radical

a friend and i were talking about how, though there are dozens of potential true loves for everybody on earth, people tend to only fall in love with one “style” of person. this shed light on my pseudo identity crisis of late. see, it turns out that a chronic inability to commit to a lifestyle paired with a scholarly fascination of subcultures, is an unfortunate combination resulting in the tendency to research everything to death without actually doing shit.

sometimes i wish i was a hardcore rock climbing girl that could impress boys by throwing around words like “belay” and “traverse,” neither of which i’m familiar with. and sometimes i want to be the freckled organic girl that doesn’t shave and sweetens her tea with stevia, the kind of girl that wears hemp skirts and is too pure for lip gloss. and when i get depressed—when i let the zombies at work get me down—i want so badly be the kind of girl that cares about nothing more than weddings and shoes and feels accomplished having read the devil wears prada. the kind of girl that fits in and shuts up.

but none of those girls are me, christina ann cusolito. i guess i just don’t have a “thing.” there’s no dominating interest or opinion that defines me, and sometimes i wonder what people possibly have to say when they describe me. deep down, i know that life is a la carte, and that the world is just one big beautiful catalog from which to pick and choose. and ideally, we’d all combine hobbies and philosophies in hopes of coming up with something new, something unique to only us. like a fingerprint of sorts.

so i’m going to grant myself to permission to, in five years time, raise chickens in my backyard, yet shave my legs. to write poetry without being a poet (or vice versa). to subscribe to glamour magazine and the sun.

and hopefully, someone out there, will fall in love with my style of girl.

oh, and this is from how to find the work you love:

[joseph campbell] went on to say that when you commit yourself to following your bliss, "doors begin to open for you where there were no doors and where they would not open for anybody else." while this may sound somewhat mystical, it is really a matter of trusting that the intelligence which is in all of life—the intelligence that turns the heavens, that migrates the birds, the intelligence that tells a seed when to germinate, that beats your heart and digests your food—lives inside of you and knows what to do with your life.

i like that.

dear bellingham,

i need you to get good fast. i find myself eyeing other cities on my big map of a shower curtain. i think about portland while washing my hair. i think about missoula while shaving my legs. i even think about the familiar traffic-jammed streets of seattle, wondering if the few aspects i like could be enough to sustain me.

bellingham, sometimes outside i get giddy just knowing that i'm taking your air into my lungs and your grass in between my toes. i always say that the birds sing prettier and the dogs smile wider in your city-space. but i fear that my love for you is an entity all it's own—not something that can be incorporated into who i'm destined to become. you are my lover, yes, but not my mate. you are my collage to my poetry. my sylvia plath to my erica jong. a novelty full of organic cream and exboyfriends who taste like the sadness of cigarettes and beer.

you are the city in which i experienced my first ear-ringing, wall-spinning bout of drunkenness in a bar that no longer even exists. the city in which i learned about the pretentiousness of l=a=n=g=a=g=e poetry and fell in love with ginsberg's angel-headed hipsters. the city in which i befriended the professor who's spent her life following her whims around the world. the city of the lone seaside kiss that should have gone further. the city that taught my tongue how to tangle with beer. the city that still rocks and cradles my heart.

but bellingham? i fear my love is not enough to keep me.

love,

christina

p.s. december 1 - 22
mexico/guatemala/belize
done.

in college, on my way home from my poetry classes, an odd combination of words would often pop into my head, and i would dig frantically through my backpack for a pen, whispering the words over and over again as if i were trying to remember a phone number. i always had observations written on my hands. a girl "gave" me the word wisteria for my birthday. things like that don't happen anymore. and for a long while i was glad because writing was starting to give me anxiety. i mean it's a lot easier not to care about particular shades of pink or the number off whiskers on a cat. it's easier to just ride through life off of the momentum of statistics and headlines. but now i feel like i've lost my keen eye for the details, i don't notice things as much as i used to. the surrealism slid off of my glasses and i want it back. so what do we do? that's a pure gold question. it's so tempting to soothe my worry with action. but i know that the laws of the universe deem that nothing i want is upstream. that my "work" is to let go of the oars, so the details will sort themselves out. derrick jensen said something like, i spent so much of my twenties doing not much of anything, if you look at it from a production standpoint, but doing a lot, if you look at it from the perspective of trying to find out who i am and what i love. getting grounded. and that took a lot of time, a lot of time spent sitting by a river reading, or taking walks, or sometimes watching baseball. so i'm going to spend my time reading the jungle, taking long walks in the rain, and forgiving my coworkers for tonight's absolute lack of compassion towards a dying cat.

come december, i'm running away to central america with a boy. we're buying plane tickets on monday.