sitting at my kicthen table, sweating and nose running from my super spicy dinner, i cannot help but grin when i catch myself thinking, "ashleigh, you're so pretty!"  it's nice having confidence even when you feel so gross.

Mumford and Sons - Little Lion Man

oh my goodness, Mumford and Sons. HOW DID I NOT KNOW?

this is just what i need to kick the last year of undergraduate work off right. music that is both mournful and uplifting.

WHY DON'T I LIVE IN NEW YORK?
california, you bore me.  i need skyscrapers and people with an overwhelming sense of entitlement.  oh, yeah - and the company of all the amazing folks i left behind last time i was in the true "city".  take me hoooommeee.

i'm in an american apparel deep-v feeling mighty douchy, at the computer lab, looking woefully out the window at a town i don't feel like belonging to anymore.  SOMEONE, SAVE ME.

i believe myself daily to be on the mend, to be the master once again of davis seas, to know this word "happy" and embody it fully.

all this means is that i am allowed a daily sense of accomplishment.  all this means is that i am allowed something small to be proud of,

until sleep and dreams come and rob me of my two steps forward, drag me that unforgiving one step back, leaving me with ground to cover in the morning.

it is a daily struggle.  i cannot see the end.  though i am convinced that as readily as i conquer day, i will soon be able to conquer night, i am weighed down by the enormous, daunting shadow of that looming task.  there is so much effort to be expended and i cannot find the motivation to expend.

perhaps this is melodrama.  i will admit to such possibility.  but have you, in turn, entertained the notion that melodrama is the loaded slingshot to my goliath?  my enemy is great and powerful in his lackadaisical apathy.  while he drinks the days away, i compose.  when we find eachother on the streets and his steps bring him unsteadily towards me, i will have no shortage of carefully thought-out barbs filling my bag.  i will be prepared to slaughter with a smile. 

i still love my enemy. 
i cannot imagine a world or a life where i do not wrestle constantly with the plain-as-day fact that is: i still love my enemy.
and so my tiny victories, my daily accomplishments are soured by love, by the repetition of the name in my head and the looping projection of the "good times", the memories i cannot bear to sully, the memories that sully me.

and what i wouldn't give for an accomplishment that is wholly mine.  a first prize badge awarded not for avoiding his street, deleting his number, not speaking his name, but for going a day without using what used to be as a way to define what presently is.

my prize will be a life reclaimed.  my only task is patience.

the band (whose record i used as a gift to first tell him "i love you")
is playing tonight at sophia's (where we had our first date)

everything is too relevant, too now
i feel PANIC.

so of course, my natural reaction is to drive home to my dad where we can play scrabble and eat food and fall asleep watching TV because we're cut from the same cloth, we are, we are.

and there will be no mention of boys or olive juice or Dawes or balcony B or that suit vest he wore or kissing him in the dark outside his bedroom door and thinking yes yes yes thiscouldbesomething.

no mention of the things that make me want to cry.

today, i start my new internship working with 6th graders. i've heard from my mum that that is a terrible year and oh, it's spring and they're 12 and everyone will be so hormonal! i am unfazed, though! there is a grin on my face that i cannot get rid of and i'm wearing what i've deemed to be "teacher clothes" and it feels so good to finally be dipping my feet into the big pool of "what i want to do for the rest of my life".

wish me luck? i'm only a little bit nervous.

:D

ETA:

So, they're 4th graders and not 6th graders and OMGSOFCUTTTEEEEE!

AHHHHHH CHAUCER.

this paper will be the death of me. it couldn't be a standard analytical english paper, could it? i can pull those out of my ass. but NOOO. it must be a research paper with at least 2 outside sources. hey, fools. i did that the first time around and you docked me points for not staying close enough to the text!

here's a thought. howsabout you take your chaucer, this old dude who wrote in a language that no longer exists, and shove him up your pretentious english professor ass. he only exists in the canon to give you medieval studies people something to read. don't make me suffer because you picked a stupid, boring course of study.

BE RELEVANT, CHAUCER. STOP BEING SO OUTDATED AND OLD AND WORTHLESS! maybe then i'll be motivated to...you know...read you?