Black Frames to Stare Out

My eyes open wider then they used to. Even high school was a really squinty time for me I guess. Just lookin at some old pictures brought to my attention and a new one at the top of my other blog ‘The Farmhouse is Burning”. hm.

Anyhoot, I went up to moms for thanksgiving. It was good stuff and I saw some old friends and it was all fine and good and then I got to leave. I think one of the reasons I don’t hate being from there anymore is that I can visit it in heavy moderation, ya know? Go there, see some folks, leave. But yeah, I’m happy I got to see some folks. And my folks. It was good stuff.

But yeah, other then me being very tired, life is, well, it’s stressful, but it’s good. It’ll get better around christmas, and then better yet in the New Year.

Here we go again.

The more I start investing time into my trip to Morocco/Egypt/Israel/Turkey the more excited I am to go. I spend a lot of the time though, wishing I had someone to go with. I just see myself enjoying it more with company.

Love.

 ”It’s shocking how many kinds of addiction exist. It would be too easy if it were just drugs and booze and cigarettes. I think the hardest part of kicking a habit is wanting to kick it. I mean, we get addicted for a reason, right? Often, too often, things that start out as just a normal part of your life at some point cross the line to obsessive, compulsive, out of control. It’s the high we’re chasing, the high that makes everything else fade away. Still, they say you don’t kick the habit until you hit rock bottom, but how do you know when you’re there? Because no matter how badly a thing is hurting us, sometimes letting it go hurts even worse.”

I can’t believe I let this happen to me twice this year. Twice.

And also, I got royaly fucked by my last job, and now I have absolutly no money and I can now only hope for a paycheck on friday.

Life. It’s not so great.

The Candyman.

When I think about last night (Halloween) I don’t know what I could of asked for to make the night better other then not getting hella tired around 2am. haha My friends and I dressed up in awesome, well thought out homemade costumes (Max from Where the Wild Things Are, Alex DeLarge, a Skeleton, hip-hoptimus prime and the bad guy from Samuri Jack (Aku) and a few other friends picked up along the way) and we had a really great time all over the city.

Today, other then hurting because of the night before, things felt different. Just a change in time I suppose. I always feel a change around this time of year. My mom says its human, everyone does it.

I’m sorry for the lack of gusto. I’m kind of tired.

In the Belly of the Beast We Turned Into.

Last night I had a dream with a lot of people I know in it. There was this one part that was just Owen and i laughing really hard, and I don ‘t really know what about.

It’s 11:16pm and I’m tired, so on to that in a moment. I just wanted to stop by and say that today I went to the beach for the first time in a really really long time. It was really cloudy and there’s talk of rain tomorrow, but today, with the bonfire and the company, I had a really good time.

I also went to work, and it was the kind of windy Petaluma had after they found Owen and I thought of him.  And that guy who was playing ‘Wish You Were Here’. Yeah. I do.

New Post. Now in two Parts!

Part 1: Right behind the cigerette and that devilish smile, you’re my crack of sunlight.

I got found on the internet, by a guy I knew four years ago. Life took us to different places and I haven’t talked to him in a few years. I think I forgot what an awesome guy he is. And I don’t think I realized how awesome it would be to have him around for some of the things that have going on right now.

I also am getting paranoid about where I stand with a good friend of mine.

On Wednesday I received and email from a guy who I know from one of my classes who sent me this really great song that him and I like a lot, he said in the email “You have no idea what it’s like to be next to you.” The class that night was insane. Actually…it was mostly awkward.

Part 2: You Can Never Go Home Again.

“And although this journey is over, I’d go back if you asked me to.”

Black Sheep Free Write Turned Short Story

Officially landing in San Francisco felt abnormal. I pulled my backpack out from under the seat in front of me, off boarded the plane and strolled down the terminal to get my bag. There was no one there to meet me at the baggage claim. I watched friends and families reunite from the pay phone while digging through all my pockets. I unloaded all the spare change I had into the phone and called the only number I could remember. Sarah.

Sarah was an ex-convict Cholita I met at my last shitty job in California before moving to New York City. She looked almost exactly the same. Thick black eyeliner, crunchy long dark hair, tight shirt, loose Dickies and Chucks, but she had lost all that weight and announced she had been clean and out of prison for two years and eight months. The night I spent on her couch was stiff and uncomfortable and I left early the next morning to catch the first train to the north bay before Sarah even woke up.

The weather was drastically different when I got off the bus in Cyprus. Cyprus is one of those small quaint towns in the middle of nowhere, that people drive through constantly without even knowing it. Where you blink, and all of a sudden you realize you just drove through some downtown. There’s a liquor store, a few antique shops, a few boutiques, a diner, a K-12 school and a bus stop. There is also the river, where the bored and restless kids of Cyprus go to be bored and restless together.

And today, in the heat, the walk from downtown to my parents house on the town limits feels infinite, and the house is empty when I get there. Our family dog, Charlie, an older chocolate lab, doesn’t even bother to get up to greet me. My older brother had already arrived, his bags are still laying wayward in the living room. I stroll through the house, taking close note how she has decorated after my brother and I moved out. It’s meticulous. Everything has its place. There was the clock she made on the wall, where the clock has, instead of numbers, objects like a garden hose, a wheelbarrow with apples in it and a washboard. The floral patterned couch and my dads well loved recliner are aligned perfectly with their over sized television.

I walked slowly down the hall. Taking in the perfectly placed pictures decorating the walls. My fathers parents and siblings after arriving in The United States when my grandfather was released from prison and they had to move to the States, My young mother and her mother, in front of this house after my Grandmothers third divorce from the man I know as my Grandfather, before my mom broke grandmothers heart by going to art school, before I broke my mothers heart by going on tour. There was the picture of my Brother, smiling next to his diploma at his college graduation from the Illustration Department at San Francisco Academy of Art. My dad at the ‘four year sober’ party we through for him, the family at my graduation from UC Berkeley, before my band left for its first tour, my mom beaming proud at her retirement party. We were all there.

I opened the dark wooden door to what was my bedroom before I started college. I hadn’t seen it since. It looked like no one else had the nerve to go in either. My empty dresser was collecting dust in the corner, I picked up a guitar pick I must have left there and it left a little triangle less dusty then the rest of the surface. The carpet was still a little sunk in from where my bed used to be, and posters, album covers, and pictures of friends I hadn’t seen in years still covered the walls. Light from the sun slid in through the blinds over my window and caught the dust particles in the air perfectly. Just below the dusty stereo, I strummed the very out of tune strings of my first acoustic guitar. I put down my bags and went to the living room when I heard my family come home.

oh. fuck. yes.

This week has been Cailie versus The Rhinovirus, and I feel like decomposing, but I made it out tonight anyway. Drank Absinthe for the first time and it. is. wonderous. I also finished most school projects. ( have a lot of catching up to do) and because it’s still kind of early and I’m wide awake I’m going to be re-greening my hair in celebration of well, things going right, and that I have a new job, at a coffee shop in a really nice part of town.

AND

I’m seeing my best friend and her momma sunday.

The inside of my face feels all sticky and snotty and I feel like below my clothes, Im starting to decompose. Yuck.

Woot!

Tomorrow when I wake up things are going to be exactly the same or marginally different. I’m hoping for the difference.

I know you’re scared but baby don’t you hide.

“Why don’t we try to take the high road, though we don’t know where it ends.”

Lately I’ve been feeling a lot like I don’t know where my life is going. I lay awake and I feel like I’m in a rut and things aren’t going anywhere and I don’t know what I’m going to do after I graduate, and what am I thinking majoring in Journalism and the weight of the world is the weight of my sheets. When I pull them up to my face they’re like tsunami of fear, and uncertainty and ‘what the hell am I/was I thinking?’ I’ve always been the kind of girl to take it as it comes. I never thought about my future. I don’t know where I want to be in ten years. Ten years ago I wasn’t thinking about it.  I feel like this is the kind of shit I should have figured out by now, and all I have is a list of things I want done before I wake up and I’m in my 30s or 40s and really, I feel like for the most part I don’t know what I really want and I don’t know how to find out what I want other than to be happy and to enjoy the moment. I feel like I’m making a lot of major decisions without the knowledge and life experience to back them up, to know whats really good for me and I don’t know how to figure it all out.

I suppose youth is really wasted on the young.

I always just figured I’d Carpe the Diem and everything would work itself out. That if the next moment could just as easily be my last, why would I think about my future? and I don’t know what really triggered this, but I realized I have all these options and I feel like I need to choose one or two and they’re all so huge and I don’t want to make the wrong choice. What if I make the wrong one and it’s too late to fix it? What if I regret it? Why am I all of a sudden freaking out about it? This doesn’t feel like me at all.

They all have to do with things that I love, and I know that I may not be totally upset with whatever it is I end up choosing, I suppose I’m becoming uncertain about how I’m going to succeed in a society that is continuously telling me I’m going to fail at them. You know, Music? Writing? Journalism? Really?

So other than that, I feel like I need to go on a trip. I need to be on the road for a while, or do something different. Take a few juggling/circus skills classes at the circus center and maybe go visit Uncle Mick at his place in Washington. He is a retired roadie, and a wonderful man. Since acquiring land up north has been pestering my brother and I to come visit. I may.

I’ve been doing a lot of writing, but I’m also getting vigorously shy about it. I had this ten minute freewrite for my Creative Writing Class, about the black sheep of my family, and it’s turning into a short story and I’m finding out a lot about my family. About how I’m supposed to turn it into this fiction piece, but the truth is more interesting. About how in this generation, it may be me.

And I guess that’s where I’m at right now. I’m happy. I’m doing things that I love. I’m playing a lot of guitar, I’m writing a lot of poems and stories, I’m working on a newspaper, I’m looking for a new job, and I have a solid support system of good friends and family, but I have a lot of big decisions a head of me, that I’ve put off for so long that I can’t really avoid them anymore.

Someone like me.

I think that ending a sentance about my mother with the term ‘ugh’ leaves off a wrong message about my mother. I think seeing her twice in a week was pretty amazing stuff, and I mean, she my mom, I love her a lot, but I always get kinda stressed before my parents visit. I dunno, its wierd.

I’m an editor on the paper this semester, as well as taking Physics and Statistics. Being in an editorial position, although good, is also stressful. I’m learning a lot about journalism and the process, but also what its like to be in a management position, and to have people who work for me and yet, work under someone else. I am also learning how bad I am at being in a position of a little bit of power. Its stressful.

I’ve also been playing a lot of guitar and I dyed my hair green. Woot.