it's summer, and the only thing that seems to appropriate while driving in a tank top and shorts with the sunroof open is country music. on a long drive recently i crowed the lyrics of Jo Dee Messina songs over the roar of the wind with all the windows down.

in contrast, i also love the ballads about lost love that mirror how i feel on more introspective, sentimental days. sometimes it's nice to rock out to independent-women-i-don't-need-you-anymore-and-i'll-never-look-back songs, while other times it feels indulgent to croon to myself about how much i really miss you, even though you will never hear me. 

as i run through the streets of other cities, i rely on the steady heartbeat beats to keep me going. like most people, i also make playlists in anticipation of concerts. 

the result is a crazy Spotify mish mash that would probably make people wonder if 15 different people were adding random playlists to my account.

i love summer time. my favorite time of year. 

- The XX- Angels
- Lana Del Rey- Video Games

- Lindsey Stirling- Song of the Caged Bird

- Beyonce- Best Thing I never Had

- Walk Off the Earth- Red Hands

- Phillip Phillips- Get up Get Down

- blink-182- I Miss You

- Tacabro- Tacata

- Fall Out Boy- My Songs Know What You Did In the Dark

- Macklemore- And We Danced (ft. Ziggy Stardust)

- Hey Marseilles- Heart Beats
- Nicki Minaj- Va Va Voom

- Rihanna and Jeezy- Hard

- Drake- Started from the Bottom

- Future, Diddy, Ludacris- Same Damn Time

- Sean Kingston- Beat It

- Lana Del Rey- Young and Beautiful
- Mariah Carey and Miguel- #Beautiful

- Lianne La Havas- Don't Wake Me Up

- Jay-Z- No Church In the Wild

- Macklemore & Ryan Lewis- Cowboy Boots

- Sara Bareilles- King of Anything

- Of Monsters and Men- Mountain Sound

- David Guetta ft. Sia- Titanium

- OneRepublic- Something I Need

- Fall Out Boy- Young Volcanoes

- Alicia Keys- Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart

- Lupe Fiasco- Battle Scars

- pretty much any song by Imagine Dragons

- Eli Young Band- Crazy Girl

- Jo Dee Messina- Bye-Bye

- Jason Aldean- Dirt Road Anthem

- Zac Brown Band- Colder Weather

- M83- Midnight City

- Robin Thicke- Blurred Lines

- Arctic Monkeys- Flourescent Adolescent

"If there's any kind of magic in this world... it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know it's almost impossible to succeed... but who cares, really? The answer must be in the attempt." - Celine in Before Sunrise

things i remember:

the feeling when i touch your skin when we're outside. it gets so much hotter than mine when we are sitting under the same sunlight.

how the temperature of your skin drops as the water runs over it

the texture of your hair a few days after a haircut

the way you imitate how i walk

the way you close your fist with your palm down around a spoon when you're eating

the way the muscles in your arms tense right before you throw me into the water

the way your fingers briefly find the skin below my neck and between my shoulder blades while we are walking

the compromise i know you're making when you take my hand in yours

the way it feels when i feel your eyes on me even after i've looked away

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

sent to me this morning-- and how i needed to hear it.



You Can't Have It All 


by Barbara Ras

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam's twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,
it will always whisper, you can't have it all,
but there is this.

some mornings when I wake up, I realize my disorientation comes from composing love letters in my sleep

"I like you; your eyes are full of language." - Anne Sexton

i went for a walk at night, the way i do when i am clinging to the sweet breezy coolness of spring that lasts only a total of 10 days a year in houston. the sounds of joplin's The Entertainer wafted from one of the houses. the stars were visible (in houston, texas- can you believe it?)

i thought about the part of my adolescence that was spent playing beethoven, chopin. practicing it over and over. abhoring the practicing and monotony, plotting the best way to murder the metronome and get rid of any evidence. i remember the years later, when it dawned on me that i missed the beauty of it. of making the music. it ran right next to me, passed me by, and i never stopped to listen.

i continue to believe that the universe gives us exactly what we need. today, the first thing in my inbox from someone who thought i would like it, but little did they know that i needed it: this is water.  "you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. THAT, is real freedom."

Nora was linked by Dooce, and so I found this story:


After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.

Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?

The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—
She stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,

Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her—Southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—
Non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.

And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,

With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped
—has seemed apprehensive about any other person.

They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.


Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.”

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning. ”
― Louis L'Amour


i can't write fast enough to keep up with the things that i would like to put in words.
it's the endings that make us wake up.

as we walked across rivers and scrambled across tree trunks, M and C were talking about blogging. C said she didn't feel like she is a good writer, and that sometimes she doesn't feel like she can keep up with a blog. "I think a lot, and perhaps no one would ever understand or want to hear all I have to say." but in the end I believe that everyone can use writing for their own purpose. isn't that what writing is about? we create something in solitude for ourselves, and then cast it out in the world with the small hope that it will help someone; make someone else feel less alone; bring people together.

-

- a few weeks ago, i took my first spin class. i walked in, the room was dark and the music was throbbing, like a headache or a heartbeat, depending on the way you listened to it. a guy next to me who was decked out in biking gear helped me to adjust my bike. i was nervous. within 9 minutes i wanted to quit. i stared at the red seconds ticking away on the big digital clock and i wanted to walk out and throw up. the instructor was screaming at me to get my ass down closer to the seat and get off my handlebars. i was panting. i didn't even know what it was supposed to feel like, how do i "get off my handlebars?" it was foreign to me. i clung to the movement in everyone else's legs. i clung to the music, i clung to the feeling of being unable to keep up but trying to. i clung to every minute, and i told myself that i needed to stay the whole hour. i confronted the fact that i run away when things get tough. i confronted the fact that i've had the luxury of running away from things when they get tough. and then i made it, through the runs, through the hills, through the loaded weight, all of it. the guy next to me smiled and said that she is the hardest instructor in all of Houston, and that if it was my first class, i should feel proud to have gotten through it. i left the dark room feeling lighter, like i had dueled with something deeper than the physical exhaustion.

- on the yoga mat, R. talks about letting go of expectations. of smiling, of becoming more childlike. of not being afraid to try new things, to laugh, to dance a little. M reminds me to push myself. i stay comfortable. as I stood in warrior poses, I realized that i cling to the familiar kind of pain. what would it be like to push beyond, and reach a different place? not only in my poses on the mat, but in my heart?

-

and isn't it the way we think about things that matter? isn't it the way we command our thoughts that makes us weak or gives us strength?

“- This wife you have...
- Had. She's dead.
- I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring up
an unhappy memory.
- I can't remember anything unhappy
about [her]. ”
― Louis L'Amour

Today, a struggle to occupy the space with something that is not you. It's like the chasm that is empty immediately behind a dam, but I can feel the walls quaking trying to hold onto that emptiness. The walls can't hold forever. Will you flood me again? Will you be the deluge? Sometimes I feel compelled to ask you to be.

Today, a first look at music from Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby via NPR.

Today, waking up from dreams. Vivid dreams make for cloudy realities.

Today, fighting something greater than me. Or fighting alongside it. One of the two. These days, it's been difficult to distinguish.