i didn't come this far 
        for you to make this hard for me.

and now you want to ask me "how?"
it's like - how does your heart beat, 
and why do you breathe?
how does your heart beat, 
and why do you breathe?

why did you come here?

you weren't invited.
                   
            and you were on the outside... stay on the outside.

and now you want to ask me "why?"
it's like - how does your heart beat, 
and how do you cry?
how does your heart beat?
 







sometimes, this happens. this will happen. this happens. i'm sorry. i am sorry. i am sorry. i wonder why that in spite of that, still, this happens. it will happen. i will talk myself down, i will maybe say something, someday, maybe someday you will say something again, maybe someday this won't happen anymore, but for now, right now, and often enough that i say happens and not happened... this happens. i won't say you do this, i won't say people do this, i will say this likes to happen, and i will say this happens, and this happens to me.

the world is very, very weird.

i mean that. 
things i definitively pencil out occur, and things i bank on disappear. 
life is just too bizarre sometimes. 

but maybe this is how the machine works, and all these happenings are written into the formula. 

sometimes i feel like the world is clanging along, grinding metal and flopping robotic arms trudging forward in a cloud of soot and smoke. heaving forward against time and chance like a drugged living factory...

and other times i feel the world is like a shining golden time-piece, perfectly synchronized to a fraction within every measurable amount, whirring quietly. delicate but perfect, intricately complex beyond reason or understanding, and built by something much more atuned and infinite than us.

bad news all around today.




My favorite magazine of all time, Jane (which was reconstructed from the hip-alt-indie skeleton of beloved Sassy) will be folding next month.

Jane magazine has sustained me through stupid yet numerous bouts of self-indulgent hipster crisises - "Holy Jesus, what do I wear this Purple Thrift suede jacket with?" "Can I somehow rock a retro-bikini with biker boots?" "My hair will never be avant-garde enough to live in New York." Of course, Jane is made out of paper, and never answered back. 
(Although I always felt like after reading an issue, I could probably rock a black plastic bag if I so choosed.)

But more than that, Jane made me feel like there's a place for cheeky psuedo-bitter bohemian feminists who care about culture, politics, and human rights, but who could also care about music, art, fashion, literature and dinner parties - which didn't neccesitate a personal compromise. It was silly, loud-mouthed, introspective and self-depricating, like that friend that tells you the truth about your answering-the-door-in-your-underwear-habit, but somehow doesn't make you feel shitty about it. 

Jane never sacrificed it's strange coolness for mainstream beauty, and it never put a 'how to beat your hangover" article before a piece about a 20 year old grad students who died of Cervical Cancer (prior to nationwide awareness of about HPV, they told their readers to get tested NOW). They encouraged their readers to ask for raises at work, more playtime and toys in bed, and more representation in government and academia. Jane's fashion shoots were irreverent and sexy; plus size models with skull tattoos and women across the country they photographed on the street. They published an article celebrating breasts, with full frontal nudity, even after the magazine was blackmailed not to publish the pictures. And where else would you find a magazine that could put both Zooey Deschanel and Kate Beckinsale on the same cover? 

It might be absurd to eulogize a magazine, but its more than that. Jane folding signifies to me, more than anything else, the shift that has taken in female culture -- girls don't want to be opinionated, intelligent, driven, conscious jet-setters full of riot and cleverness. They want glorified catalogues of hangers, telling them the same useless drivel repackaged every other month in a different font. Well I don't want to please my man, I don't want to know how to tame my wild curls, I already have a billion fucking conditioners and I don't care about Jennifer Aniston anymore. I want to please myself, and with no regrets, exist how I am. 

I just wish that was enough.

Sassy, nee Jane, 1988- 2007. Long live Jane.

 

 

sometimes i wake up and i'm not in brazil and it doesn't make sense.

 

 

 

i know, i know.

Don't forget the time 
I wooed him with red wine;
The devil he wore 
such a fine, fine shirt
and it 
stayed 
so 
clean
while he dragged me through the dirt.

Now honey, don't trust anyone who looks you in the eye.
Don't take any kindness, it's a demand in disguise.

I will be rocks I will be water
I will leave this 
to my daughter.
Lift your head up in the wind when you feel yourself grow colder;
Wrap the night around your shoulders.

 

weird 'thought it was real until waaay after breakfast dream' last night. many shudders. 

annnnd it makes me ill to look at your face. not-so-much in a 'i'm likely to vomit' way, more in a 'you make me feel uncomfortable and icky' way.


what i have done at work today:

-printed out pictures of people from new jersey

-painted my nails

-facebooked for an hour

-situps and lunges

-left and went shopping

-peed about 100 times. kind of annoying at this point, actually.


i'm glad that i feel no loyalty what-so-ever to this company. it allows me to be completely uncharacteristically sketchy. 

i can't wait for a job where i don't start counting minutes BEFORE lunch. it's out there. call me overly optomistic, call me legally insane, but i'm pretty sure that somewhere floating about in the cosmos is a job i might actually enjoy. bereft of bureacracy and incompetance. 

maybe that last part is hoping for too much?

anyway. 


dream: is either directly related to present state/ present state is a direct result of said dream. not sure which.

moral of the story is, my brain is having a seizure trying to both protect me and give me a reality check. which do i need more.

i am deeply scrooged. unscrooge me please.



except for... im not, because, i cried on the train for NO REASON today. ok, truth- reason being "Promise" by Ciara came on. <--- not joking. i don't know why the emotional leakage arose from a Pop song, but it did. i think because, i started thinking about Brazil, and I was wondering how I'm ever going ot be able to be in love with someone who hasn't been down there with me. and that if someone i'm in love with ever went down there again with me, that'd be literally the most important thing i think they could ever do. 

...so then i started crying like a bitch.




i'm really sick of... whatever malaise afflicts me. i just want to be genuinely happy about christmas, and i'm not. i'm just out of touch with myself and annoyed.

stopstopstopstopstopstopstooopppppppppppppppppppppppppppp.



snap.
out.
of.
it.

 

 

i see myself being awful and i can't stop it.

i guess years later doesn't really matter, especially not when its far too far, especially not when its a lot of consequences, especially not now.

it's just... it was good, and sometimes you wanna capture that and seal it up, and other times you wonder what it was like. it sticks to me a lot, like melted caramel with a million little sugar threads connecting to every part of everything. sticky and fine and pervasive.

he was so/too close.










And he told me that I'd done alright
And kissed me 'til the mornin' light, the mornin' light
And he kissed me 'til the mornin' light.

once you had a reason
and once you had a place
you had it all and laid it all to waste
and I know you hated to need us
but why'd you need to hate?
and where'd you learn to shoot without restraint?

oh baby; won't you cry?
show me there are some tears behind your eyes.
oh baby; won't you cry?
why'd you have to kill to feel alive?




so he's going to portland. and she's going to phoenix.

and i'm sincere behind my advice to them both. 'go, find yourself, because thats whats really important.'

i have this whole theory about time, and wasting it.
see, on my birthday i finished this book about losing time, and i had this overwhelming sense of foreboding all of a sudden. and i told someone, i said 'i think something really bad is going to happen tonight'. i said that, but what i really honestly thought, was that i was going to die. i thought that i was going to just be walking around, and get hit by a car, and that would be that. i really half believed that. i didn't try to make the day special, or say everything i wanted to say to everyone. but i felt a little panic. because even when you say to someone 'if i died right now, i'd be ok with it'... well thats bullshit. i wouldn't have been ok with it. i would've been really mad, because i still have so much to do. and i just wanted a little more time to get on that.

to be truthful, something pretty bad did happen that night. just not to me.

but what if it was supposed to. what if, somehow i bargained out some more time?

so that leaves me with her going to phoenix, and him going to portland. and is it braver for me to go back where i was and fight it out? or should i cut my losses and pick the unknown evil... the door number two.

have you ever watched those guys in the city hide a coin under a cup? and they have three red cups, and they move them all around really fast, and you bet on which cup the coin is under. the person picking, they're pretty sure the coin is under the cup they pick. pretty sure that's what cup they should be picking. but right before, right before the grifter lifts the cup, you always see this look flash in the person's eyes: 'what if i picked the wrong cup?'

why is our love for god, and the love for our girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands, so similar?

one is chosen by us, one was chosen for us. or maybe the other way around...
we need them both; to fill a void, to answer questions about ourselves, to thank for all they show us. both, we question is it worth it to have faith in something unseeable, untouchable... we want proof.
show me that you are there.

from each, all we live for is a sign that they are listening, understanding. do they have our backs when we stummble?

and when each of them go, we are left to wonder what it is that we've done wrong. or why and how; why they would let us fall, how they could let it happen to us.

they define us, our faith, our love- the reality of each. the highs when we feel blessed. the lows and yearning for when we weren't forsaken.

between the conversations with each, the time is wasted. 'maybe next time'. we wait to talk, wait to say all the things we need to say.

maybe the blind love for god, the belief, the piety... maybe that's the way we heal our hearts when we can't find anyone else. maybe if we aren't loving something, we lose ourselves. and it doesn't matter who it is, really. because god is the ultimate other- never says anything back, except what we want to make out of the silence.