with my own blood in my mouth

My day was okay; I got my teeth cleaned and behaved myself for the most part. I thought a little about this weekend again, which was weird in certain ways and exciting in others. I made some new friends this weekend, which is something that's not very natural to me anymore, and so I guess I had to prowl around and think about that some.

I have this feeling that my blog isn't very good or interesting this year. I have less good stories and more vague things. I had this idea over the weekend that I wanted to write up a lot of the things that happened because they all felt very strange and narrative, but I didn't.

One of them was that at the castle party, we met up with a new(ish) friend and her two roommates. Afterward, we all went out to Pompeii and got pretty smashed. It was extremely fun. We danced a lot. We swung by my place after, at about 2 AM. The boys went upstairs to watch music videos, and then my friend, her roommate, and I sat on my front porch and talked about men and drank Miller Lite and they smoked. Sitting out late at night with pretty girls? Gosh. I really liked them, and I wanted them to like me. I tried to be so correct. The roommate, who is blonde and petite and beautiful, told me that we could pass for sisters, except that she would be the evil witchy one and I'd be the sweet Cinderella. A statement probably laughable to anybody who knows me well. Oh gosh, new people! Blank slates! It was very surreal.

I am not so cool, though, I am a goon, and I like that. I can pass for cool professionally, when I wear pencil skirts and talk about my field. I'm a good hostess, a great cook, and I can be polite and make a good impression. I'm excellent at lighting fires and sometimes I'm funny. A lot of times I'm mean. At least you get a little older and you know what angles work best for you, and which people you really, actually care about and want to impress. Not the strangers. But it was nice to play for a night.

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There's bad weather coming on. Roleplay hyperactive and turned on! No, no. I am mellow just this week.

There's been so many years since there was a real hurricane around here. I remember them very vividly from my childhood: Fran, Bertha, later sweet Isabel who rooted up so many of the wonderful trees in the park where I go running with my mom. I think it was with her in 2003 when we got off school, and Justine and I just tore around in our little shirts soaking wet getting into as much trouble as possible and fighting the wind.

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Work is finally being interesting. On Monday I have a meeting with a potential new printer, and that's pretty exciting. It's good to finally be potentially making a change that could mean something.

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I took this scruffy, hour 15 face selfie entirely and only because my boobs looked good tonight, but also my hair is coming in so dark. My brother and my mom picked out this top for me as an Easter gift, so I'm pretty fond of it.

I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.

If I'm honest, today has bummed me out. I saw all the signs lining up for it, and it was almost exactly like I expected. Now, in its hollows, the rain started up again, I went home late, made a good dinner, cleaned up, and put away laundry. Now I'm sitting up in my upstairs window listening to the far off noise of someone screaming at his wife. I have like a terrible tangle of things I'm excited to write about on this thing, but at the moment, I just feel kinda worn down. I so often come across wrong; not just wrong, but the worst idea of myself I can imagine, and that bums me out. I think I'm just so tired.

Something funny/horribly stressful that happened today was that I went over to feed the cats for Chris and Katie, and the key they'd left for me didn't work. I was going crazy, dashing around rattling windows, trying to figure out if the key was wrong or if I was just that stupid, and feeling pretty bad about myself. I kept imagining both their little mean tiger cats dying under my bad inattention while they were at a funeral in Canada. I called them, verified that yes, it was the right key, and continued flailing. Eventually, I went back to check the hutch I'd been originally told to find the key in, and... sure enough, there was another, second key there on a different shelf.

Apparently, whoever had owned their house before them had stored their spare key, unnoticed by Chris and Katie, in the exact same hutch. Who would have thought? People have much the same ideas.

Here's one picture of many of a castle we went to this weekend. This wasn't actually the castle itself, but a landscape castle in front of the main castle(s).

What the heart wants? The heart wants
her horses back.

-Downhearted, Ada Limon

My night

“Castle Motsognir eats her prey alive. What pity is there for the dead?"

McCarren Park when the beauty bled out

I love this time of year. Everything the air touches seems so much more vivid, rich, just soaked in color. Driving to and from work in the big spaces of my towns this week has been so gorgeous. I feel so lucky to live here this season. The whole soft pink gold melty early autumn Valley looks like something I want to put my mouth on.

I finally got Ada Limon's Bright Dead Things in the mail, so now I'm just resisting posting a ton of lines from it. I hope that you will appreciate the amount of restraint this requires of me.

I miss running. I've been a little sick, which somehow my mom already knew about and texted me to chat about: mildly spooky. I also talked to Chels, who proposed that she and I get gay incest married and move to an island with only us on it.

I'm not in a bad mood. I'd been feeling a little unattractive this week, and even today, but everything feels pretty positive. Two strangers told me they liked my outfit today, and both my friends I saw told me I looked pretty. That felt nice. I like to be told stuff like that; I'm just a simple sort of girl.

Trying to put this migraine to bed, doing laundry and burning my incense that always throws me back to a happier time. It smells like old school legends, like old musty tent, light rain on a campfire, leather, decaying logs, green apples, loamy damp leaves, Virgilina hay grass, smashed persimmons, and all my best.

I hate to be one of those girls who complains about her migraines. Lots of people get terrible headaches, or worse, much more debilitating ailments. I get mine fairly rarely: maybe 4 a year. They could be much worse.

That said, today, I feel like a dark wizard is trying to break me mentally with a brain tornado made of glass, and that dark wizard is winning. Today, I don't count.

I'm a girl who could use a win today. I feel like sometimes all I do is fuck everything up. Some highlights today were failing to run, failing to friend, failing to spend the right amount on groceries and making my spouse cross. All my sunflowers are blowing down. I spent like 30 minutes searching under my deck for a black widow spider the size of a 50 cent piece, and now I'm just crying into a WIP trifle. A fucking trifle, like with fruit and whipped cream and custard. Is there anything more pathetic than that?



Edit: complete sadness trifle.

Happy windowsill

You wear your mask, I'll wear mine; we can pretend that our fates were entwined

 "Go back!  Go back!  I had rather die than be whipped."
-a mortally wounded J.E.B. Stuart, being carried from the battlefield

Well, there goes Jackson in Rebel Yell. You've got to hand it to the Confeds for their good death scenes, at least.

Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever live up to my dedications

I wish I was delicate, I wish my name was Clementine

My car was briefly filled with leaf mold and burlap this weekend, and now it smells weirdly like my childhood. My dad's car smelled like that: full of landscape paint, rulers and compasses and sketches and good pencils for his blueprints, coriander (or pot, never sure) seeds, mulch, beer cans, plastic plant containers...  It's funny how transportive scent memory is. I'm right back as a kid.

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It's a busy week. I don't really need to be writing this. Still, it's something to pick at as I sort the nostalgic clutter. It's all in bad shape. A lot of it has been obviously sewn back together. A sheath with the fur ruff of a coat from four years ago. I looked at old pictures today and we all just looked like children, especially me.

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Turner Ashby was a dick, I don't care what anybody says. He was no true knight.

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I drew the knight of wands today, speaking of knights.

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I like this picture of myself because I look like an adult, which is what I am.