ode to dickles

there's this girl i live with. her name is erika dick. i like to call her dickles, secretly. now she knows. but honestly, although sometimes we drive each other crazy, we love each other dearly. erika is smart, funny, gorgeous, real, and unbelievably kind. today we were hanging out in the living room, enjoying the afternoon sun coming in though the big bay windows (not sure if we actually have bay windows, but i like that image) and erika said something really funny. i was fake swearing, because this semester i have tried really hard to keep my mouth clean, and so i was fake swearing and then erika said, "ahww sheeeiiiaaa!" and we have been saying this all day long. even when i was in the shower and i dropped something and quietly, or so i thought, said "awh sheeeiia!" erika heard (it's not creepy; the house is really small and has thin walls) and responded with her own hearty, "ahhww sheeeiia!" she keeps me laughing and smiling and sane. no really, tonight i was going crazy and she talked me though it. love you erika.

a heterosexual love poem

a hidden garden
a secret path
to flirt with danger
and nature's wrath
can i follow you
just one time more
to that eternal staircase
where thoughts of forever pour?

so william blake,

The Human Abstract

Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor:
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;

And mutual fear brings peace;
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.

He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears:
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.

Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the Catterpiller and Fly,
Feed on the Mystery.

And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the Raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.

The Gods of the earth and sea,
Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain

---

you remind me of home

i'll take the small feminist, with a side of bitter, maybe a dash of lesbian?

how do you turn your dishwasher into a snowplow?

smack her on the butt and hand her a shovel.






i never understood why she had to be smacked on the butt. male domination, i guess. i enjoy sexist jokes just as much as the next mysoganist or maybe as much as the next reasonably humorous human being. no really, that's not sarcasm.

i may have made a mistake by taking a women in literature and culture class this semester. the whole two hours of the first day of class were basically a definition of feminism. what is it? how is it different from femininity? what does it mean to be a feminist? so everyone is calling out answers like "empowerment" and "equality" and "women's rights!". i raised my hand and said "how about bitter, angry, possibly lesbian?" hoping someone would back me up. nope. hahaha.
i'm just really over the whole abortion speech, the talks about women's rights, the "let us out of the kitchen" plea. yes, plea.

my teacher made comments throughout the class about how some people think that feminists are angry, cynical lesbians because the media portrays them that way. she hoped that some people's opinions could be changed after taking this class.

so i started the reading assignment for tomorrow's class and was pleasantly surprised. the women and in some cases, men, were making a good case for women's rights without sounding bitter and angry. then the prompt for the response, "what are the complexities of being a woman in society today?" really made me think about it. i'm a lucky one. yeah, i was born the wrong gender, but hey i'm middle class, white, american christian. i don't have to wear robes over my entire body. education is available in full. i'll never deal with castration or genital mutilation like my sistas in the motherland. but i started thinking, really thinking, about what it means to be a woman in society today.

it seems like the theme for my spring experience is learning to love and respect myself. i have some really good examples who are helping me change my preconceived notions (erika and alyssa) and this class might just be another blessing in disguise. who knows?

the only day it will be april 16 2009

the past few days i feel like i have been awakened from a really deep sleep. maybe it's the combination of  no school + going somewhere new every day + springtime + new goals that i'm actually keeping?  who knows. all i know is i like it. 

this morning alyssa called me. "i was thinking maybe we should catch a bus and go try some greek food?" she asked/said, a really cute quirk of hers where she tacks "maybe" into most suggestions she makes. it sounded like a great idea to erika and me, so we did it. getting out of laie for a day is always a nice vacation from real life. (haha like my beautiful life in hawaii could ever be called that) we hopped on the southbound 55 circle island tour and made our way to honolulu. you should have seen us- sitting next to each other on the bus, each with our noses buried in a book. yeah we're cute like that. 

after scoping out the selection- italian, chinese, japanese, something we weren't sure was even food, and thai, we elected to stay the course with our original plan of greek. the hole in the wall restaurant came equipped with blue and white decor and a giant white table where we ate. 

we wandered, but not quite aimlessly, through downtown honolulu searching for gelato but ending up with the best frozen yogurt i have ever had, yes, better than the red mango. (cheaper, too) and then pretended we were rich enough to buy a 7 carrot, four hundred something thousand yellow canary diamond that we saw in HM. the sunset was literally breathtaking, like it actually made me stop breathing, and then the craziest old man and his mp3 player (i don't want to say entertained, because as stu says, you shouldn't have to endure entertainment and you kind of have to endure this guy, oh what the h) entertained us as we waited for the bus home. 

also- five separate times we were almost killed by a biker, a bus, a car, another biker, and a skateboarder. sometimes i'm amazed we make it home alive. 

thank You

thank You for the humor in all things- from tumordog to a crazy man on the bus practically shoving his earbud into my right ear (which might now have rabies) to make me guess who phil collins is to asking the jeweler at HW if they have ever been robbed.

thank You for an ugly purple beach cruiser and strong calf muscles. twentysomething miles up north shore would a take a lot longer without them.

thank You for colors- blue sky and even bluer ocean, orange and purple birds of paradise, pink and palm tree sunsets, the iced yellow pineapple at a roadside stand.

thank You for music. a green ipod shuffle to take me running, a guitar to break the ice, and a piano to drown IT all out. for friends to harmonize life's melodies.

thank You for the redhead man and his beak of a nose, who i see everywhere i wouldn't expect. i'm honestly not sure if he is real.

thank You for a mother who remembers most of the same things i see everyday and that we are close enough to laugh about them. a mother who feels more like a sister, which i would imagine is the best of both worlds.

thank You for the hard times and the scary thoughts, that provide opportunity for others to love.

thank You for the narrow streets and corner drugstore, for the beautiful brown children and the spongy grass that isn't quite the same here.

thank You for the endless supply of love, free food, and blessings i find every day of my wonderful life.

what it takes to start an all girls, acoustic beatles cover band

during cleaning check today erika came up with a brilliant plan: "let's start a beatles cover band!" she said, with those big blue eyes. she was holding a thousand soapy dishes and i was scrubbing the window sill.

besides being a genius idea, it's an undercover plan to keep alyssa in laie for spring term. 

picture this: alyssa is on the organ/piano

                       erika will tamber

                       i'll shred acoustic 

no one's doin that :) 

the end of an era

music is worthless 

unless it can 

make a complete stranger 

break down 

and cry. 

                                                     -frou frou 

one year

an english teacher from last year

curly wild-on-purpose hair

his tshirt that said "it's in the syllabus" 

there is such a thing as too much academia.

trudging through three feet of snow

having two sets of car keys with buttons to unlock my door. 

and scraping off an ice circle to see 

though the windshield.

having my own room, my own sink. 

all that space with so much room to think. 

racing to the mailbox every thursday

literally cursing the mailman when it was empty. 

a big white apartment building crammed 

parking spaces and morgan sjoblom two doors down.

pale white skin to blind my eyes if 

the sun ever came out again. 

jars and boxes and cartons

walking in the store today

feeling blue and bluer

staring at jars and boxes and cartons

unable to decide 

what i want. 

pretending it was you pushing the cart. 

it wasn't. 

is it easier to hang on to old memories

than to actually create new ones? 

a short list comprised of reasons i love april 6, 2009

a. no quiz in english (i haven't finished, nor do i plan to finish death of a salesman)

b. 40 mins of piano practice time at lunch and transposed passenger seat to singability 

c. singing mass in choir from memory and only forgetting 1/3 of the words instead of all

d. sunshine in laie

e. north shore with mike berries- acai bowls, watching the sun go down, and collecting shells

f. the local boy with his guitar next to our towels who played and sang, beautifully, for two hours. 

g. explaining the five sentence types to mike berries. 

h. leftovers for dinner

i. "north shore"     check it

j. taking a bath

k. texting bryson brev

l. playing music 

what a lovely day i just had. and now, to sleep. goodnight moon! 

open your eyes

it's time for spring cleaning. we all feel it around this season- weight loss diets for around the corner summer, mowing lawns, raking the old, dead leaves out from the rosebeds, washing the car in the front lawn, throwing out old sweaters. i feel like it's time to clean out my head, too. fix all those bad habits that seem to creep in every winter. funny how it felt like winter, even here in laie.

i'm stoked on life. starting new, getting back into shape, reading the new testament again this spring. music! i feel like i've been missing out on so many things to do in this life and i'm so lucky! i am young, single, free, and awesome. time to get to it. 

my april fool's

riding my bike to school

through the wind

pushing and pedaling too hard

i saw a boy 

his skateboard, so cool so hip

jealous for a moment until

he fell

and looked around 

who saw

got back on, and fell again.

laughed at himself

april fools.

walmart trips and the face of death

 

bonnie got off work at dominoes around 830. "let me just run home and change my pants." she said when i called her.  "i'll swing by and pick you guys up."

by us guys she meant, erika, alyssa, and myself. we were all sorts of revved to get out of laie for a night. bonnie came by and we piled into her old taurus, frankie. side note: her ipod converter for the car doesn't actually work unless you twist the cord until the knots are  j u s t  right. we elected to sing at the top of our lungs most of the night, sans ipod. 

there is something universal about walking into a walmart. there's the little old man filing the job of "greeter" who never actually greets you. the yellow walmart smiley face beams down at you, assuring you- yes, our prices actually are rolled back. there's the family with the screaming baby and squirly teenagers out doing their late-night shopping. look around and you'll see that woman, who might actually be a man, with that mustache and short miniskirt. who knows? yes, late-night walmart trips are the same, no matter where you are.  immediately you have to touch everything in sight and shop to your consumerist heart's  content, for all the things you don't actually need. 

We wandered through almost every aisle, packing our baskets with all the little luxuries the foodland in laie doesn't provide: hair care, makeup, lip gloss, $8.50 orange and white striped bikini tops. It's amazing how obnoxious and loud four little  college girls can get at night. Oh to be young and in college. These are the memories i'll save, tuck away, and tell my children about in twenty years. 

The drive home was ridiculous. mililani (walmart) is about an hour from laie (home), so we stopped for libations at the nearest 7-11. the usual dodgy characters were browsing the late night caffeine selection under cheap florescent lighting.  alyssa made a major find- pickled peaches. shrink wrapped. brown. we elected not to try them. 

a twentysomethingyearold giant of a man in a what-used-to-be-white cutoff tshirt was ahead of me in line. he had that tough i'll kill you look about him. his only purchase clutched in filthy, brown hands: 2% milk. as he handed the cashier a five, i said, "getting crazy with some late night milk eh?" and had one of those moments where i wish i didn't talk. ever. "gotta get my two percent." he grunted and without looking at me, trudged to the door and out to his (of course) giant, lifted, dirty, manly, pickuptruck. the moment us girls walked out of the gas station, the giant backed out of his parking space, but by backed out i mean peeled out, tires screeching, and as he turns to burn through the parking lot, he kills his engine and has to restart his compensation for something truck. 

shame. 

so then, as we are pulling out to leave, a man is walking toward us and as he gets closer bonnie screams. think davy jones meets mad eye moody. crazy eyes, with some kind of silver liquid leaking out all over his weathered face, tangles of silver hair, cutoff jeans, shirtless, shoesless, and soul sucking glare. we looked into the face of death that night. 

good grief i love my life. :)