today walking through the university of michigan campus i realized that i wanted to go back to oberlin. this was after weeks of sometimes not wanting it, just wanting to keep spending all my money on comet coffee and rope yoga and employee meal sandwiches too big to fit into your belly in the 20 minutes of break time. but i kept seeing the people i wanted to see where they weren't, like displaced ghosts, and i wanted wilder bowl so bad i almost just let myself want it, instead of changing my mind a minute later just so i could not have what i wanted, or at least not want what i have.

this month i am experimenting with acting in grown-up ways i always considered perpetually too grown up to ever act- my winter term project is an unofficial delving into romance based off of richard linklater films and my own misguided worst nightmares, as i've always felt an aversion to happiness. i feel half twelve and half thirty, and don't know whether to wait for a collapse straight out of middle school hallways, or for sprawling pipe dream realizations of front porches and kitchen counters. sometimes i do not feel old enough for myself, don't trust myself saying grown-up things to someone and don't trust them believing what was said. when are we old enough to know what we want and mean it? or maybe it's the opposite, when are we old enough to stop knowing what we want. or worse, we say we know what we want, not knowing when we're old enough to trust our horrible young selves.

there is a minor phenomenon in our culture in which non-happiness ironically becomes a raison d'etre. we have effectively sensationalized sadness, and i now (dumbly) feel at times out of the loop to have left the club of people who listen to lua on replay and don't even blink when some other girl tugs her sleeve down over her mound of bracelets. i think all of us were maybe a little sickly determined to have bigger, truer problems than the rest- now i'm almost disappointed to scramble and find none. it should not be that surprising. but still i wonder, how many newly-happier people are fully happy with their happiness.

i've fallen back into john berryman's sonnets to chris, and tonight am particularly taken by the first one, which seems appropriate. so here it is:

I wished, all the mild days of middle March
This special year, your blond good-nature might
(Lady) admit-- kicking abruptly tight
With will and affection down your breast like starch--
Me to your story, in Spring, and stretch, and arch.
But who not flanks the wells of uncanny light
Sudden in bright sand towering? A bone sunned white.
Considering travellers bypass these and parch.

This came to less yes than an ice cream cone
Let stand... though still my sense of it is brisk:
Blond silky cream, sweet cold, aches: a door shut.
Errors of order! Luck lies with the bone,
Who rushed (and rests) to meet your small mouth, risk
Your teeth irregular and passionate.


Things I particularly love:
the seventh line, with its continuation of the run-on sentence and then that quick wonderful phrase of the bone sunned white.
all of the wonderful hyperbaton that makes the logic seem roundabout and muddled and train-of-thought-like and like a maze. it is amazing, which is what that word actually means, which also is really cool.
the fact that the fifth line starts with "me," as if asserting the speaker's place in the story, which even after so much roundaboutness, is kinda the point.

the last line. well maybe the last two lines. but the last line especially.

someone talked to me once about friendship, all the different shapes it takes. his explanation broke things down by what the two people do together: friends who share gossip, friends who share secrets, friends who share regrets, then hand-holding friends, tooth-kissing friends, ear-biting, let-me-into-your-bed friends. sometimes they overlap, sometimes they don't, and i don't know which is more dangerous.

in 2010,

i resolve to eat crisper apples, have fewer split ends, and do whatever i can not to grow shorter.

"nobody knows what the world is for"

someone said this tonight. we were lying on our backs in the snow next to the huron river. our feet were propped up on the fence in front of us and i could not feel my toes. the sky was that weird peach-grey glowing color, the snow was blue, and the trees looked like roots. if you tilted your head back, you could see the whole line of trees behind you, waxy through the snow that was still falling, their tops jagged like so many scratch marks. and when he said that, that nobody knows what the world is for, i almost believed him, except for that my favorite memories of anyone are usually not of them at all but of the way the world looked curling around them. it is probably very selfish and silly to say that the world is for curling around a person, but truthfully i can't imagine lying like that in any other place than where we were, with the snow lighting the sky up the color of skin and the river not listening and the cold on us so that we could not even move, and the trees so still we could not even leave.

listen to "old times," by the elected

I think this is a wonderful time, the first long period when everyone has come back from school. After months of summer spent preparing for and imagining the ways we would and wouldn't change, now we finally get to see how right we actually were. It gives a rather stark perspective on who you are not and probably will not ever be friends with, but the friendships you do have now have to answer to all kinds of questioning- is this really sustainable afterall, or does it just not fit now that everything's been rearranged? When does a new room mean there is no room?
It's funny, the lengths we go for what's comfortable. When old routines and relationships are falling back into their places all around you, you think, well why not? Whether or not you want it falls by the wayside- easy plus familiar might as well equal something close to desirable, at least if you squint. Then you find yourself shoving everything around to make your life like a time capsule of itself. In a recreation of when you wanted what you insist you still want, it is important to arrange it so no one will notice how tightly the seams are stretched.
This week has seen the return of two people I thought I was probably done knowing, and there is no question that even though I can find no reason to, with both I am trying. Boredom is of course part of things, but how much really? I think a lot of it is a sort of opportunity-induced nostalgia, for what you didn't think you wanted until suddenly you could have it, and if you can have it then why bother not wanting it anymore?

But how long can someone go thinking that anyone or anything can fit anywhere anytime. Everyone's screaming about change, but when it comes half the time it's ignored. Of course, there's the counter argument, of how much going back to something is all about proving change. I think this might be the worst kind of nostalgia, because it thinks it isn't that at all, when really it is, but full of bitterness too. There is maybe no really easy way to leave and come back. If you come back, there must be something you're coming back to, and then there's all sorts of trouble to trick yourself into wanting. And it all looks so comfortable! You might even forget that once your hands were so full of why you were leaving it would have taken you a week to write all the reasons down.