on summer beginnings and avoiding Christian Bale

We must have had a relatively easy spring this year here in our little Cowboy Town in the Central Valley, because I remember this day came way back in April last year--but the day has finally come when I can walk outside onto the cement and burn my no-heat-tolerance feet in a split second. Now here comes the question: do I stay safe and keep my flops by the front door, or do I go out barefoot, baby steps, one more at a time, and build that tolerance which my feet have known in past years...?

Complications: Is there any point? Everything's cold and wet in San Francisco. I'm not going to be here much longer.

Counterargument: I don't leave until August. DUH. August is hot in Cowboy Town.

Best Friend and I have finally gotten started on our Summer Bucket List, and I think it might be me just being overly optimistic, but I think we've put a good dent into it so far, considering our resources. Prevalent on our list is some sort of sense of adventure, and I'm not sure if it was the both of us who instilled it in our plans or just me, because over the past couple of years I've been feeling it deep in my bones. We are perfectly poised in a wonderful place for adventuring, if you know how to do it and are going with the right people. Cowboy Town is like this little upper-middle class oasis, folded in amongst a grimy and seedy city, desolate farmland, and MOUNTAINS, beautiful, cool, clear mountains, and miles upon miles of golden foothills, probably riddled with rattlesnakes and their holes. That's the part that sucks. I've got this huge sense of adventure, but my city-girl, indoor-type survival instincts seem to be getting in the way.

In any case, we've started out small, and we're attempting to find every elementary school in our school district. This is no easy feat, because the district extends WELL past the city limits--and there are 32 of them. THIRTY-TWO, and five high schools. The town I grew up in had eight elementaries and ONE high school. Even five years later, this is still baffling to me. We've made some good headway, though--all the schools in our high school boundaries, plus a few extras. We just don't always have the car. And if we do, we don't always have the money to refill the gas we've used up on the way, since both of our cars are ridiculous gas guzzlers.

My good old 2001-ish white Chevy Malibu. He has a name--it's Ronald. Not after Ronald McDonald, which people tend to assume... After Ronald Weasley. I tried to name my Dad's car Sirius, but it didn't necessarily fly. Boyfriend calls Ronald "Fat Ronald", considering his weight and speed of acceleration (that is to say, he's not very speedy at all...), which I think makes him sound like a mob boss. I'm okay with that. The unfortuante thing is, Fat Ronald is so fat and so heavy and so very inefficient that he only gets about 17 mpg, and has a 12 gallon tank. He gets expensive, especially when my mom won't let me buy cheap gas and Chevron is charging $3.21, and Shell isn't much less. Cowboy Town is expensive.

One of the biggest goals on our list (to me, anyway) is avoiding Christian Bale, which we're doing well on so far... Ever since reading American Psycho, and watching just a few minutes of the movie, I've been scarred for life and scared out of moving to New York entirely... I keep having these nightmares, which is discouraging, though I don't necessarily classify that as not avoiding Christian Bale, since it's just a subconscious thing. It's unsettling, though. It's probably the most tricky item there, too--what if we're just randomly window-shopping in Target (another thing on the list) and all of a sudden he pops out of the kitchen appliance aisle?! Or what if I'm flipping through movie channels on the telie and suddenly I stumble across The Dark Knight??! Alas, Newsies, which used to be one of my favorite musicals--that's truly where I fell in love with Christian Bale--is out of the picture entirely. As is Howl's Moving Castle, in English anyway. It's so funny how one can be elevated so far in my eyes, and suddenly something so small ruins it--I mean, cutting up people with chainsaws and killing little boys at the Central Park Zoo and feeding kittens to ATMs and sending rats up a lady's.... Well, anyways, I'll probably be scared away for life. No question about it. and I don't even have a problem with this, because it's like a self-induced exile, or something.

All in all, I guess summer has finally arrived. It's time to get out of bed and stop recooperating from graduation and all the crap that went on from April all the way through the first two weeks of June. It's time to start eating right, and to exercise, and to boost my metabolism, which may have finally peaked and is beginning to fall down, just like I knew it would someday. I am an adult, and it's time to take responsibility for my actions and for myself. It doesn't sound too difficult... at least from where I'm standing right now, anyway.

an introduction to optimism

Hopefully writing isn't like a muscle. Because if it's one of those "Use It Or Lose It" things, and you have to keep flexing it to keep it in shape... Then I'm screwed. The past six-ish months have sapped me of all creative energy that I could possibly have held on my person every day, for a multitude of unknown and maybe fathomed reasons. I don't agree with much Freud says but I like his thoughts on the subconscious and repression--if you repress emotions, they find outlets in other ways. Maybe my outlet was always writing. But when there's no repression there--just pure aggressive release of all emotion at any point in time--then that outlet isn't necessary.

So I've had nothing to write. Big deal. Now I'm graduated and somehow I feel just like that old between-sophomore-and-junior sixteen year old, alone for the summer in a big house full of tile with only the internet and Fuse to keep her company. I feel like that sixteen year old, that single little girl who had never kissed a boy but dreamt about it every night, and felt the itch every hour or so to write down some quote or some lyric imagined up in a split second. You repress any kind of sexual drive and desire and you get imagined love scenes, steamy only because they're vague reproductions of something that'd been seen on tv or stumbled across on the internet. That summer was all fantasy. My fingers wrote, and I lived through those words, through the eyes of the character that I created. I feel just like that girl again, because I'm writing in a blog to no one.

Funny thing is, I'm not that girl anymore. I'm not single, and I've been kissed many many times (by the same boy, of course). I don't have to stumble across romantic love scenes anymore because I know what it's like to live through them (well, maybe not all the way). I don't need Fuse anymore, because the house is sort of full of other people and I can drive and I have money and I can DO things, besides sitting at home all alone, taking morning naps and waiting for the daily phone call from my mother to dictate to me the chores that I needed to do today. I'M NOT THAT GIRL. I'm someone completely different. I'm WRITER (that's my name for now), and I'm eighteen, and I'm free.

...It's just sometimes I get stuck in these ruts where I see myself as that silly sixteen year old, because the circumstances were kind of similar when I woke up this morning, and then the shock is so disabilitating that I can't move.

So this is me trying to break free. The system has finally let me go--now I'm just working on my own bonds and constraints and red tape. You can watch, if you really want to. It's probably going to be a pretty interesting show.

This summer I plan to go on adventures, not just through my mind and psyche in general but in the real world, too. I plan to get my hands dirty and waste lots of gas--I plan to live on little if on anything, but eat really good things and lots of sushi and GO PLACES, and find things that few others in the world have ever found. Accompanying me on this journey will be my best friend, Best Friend, who I think has similar aspirations (besides the sushi part). Hopefully we'll be dragging along Boyfriend, too--but he's got some summer school work to handle and our time together before I leave town for college may be a little more limited than I had originally hoped.

But these are all good things--everything is good things. I'm sick of being pessimistic and realistic. Now is dawning the new age of OPTIMISM. And I'm going to handle it as best I can.

on beginnings...

In past years I've hated summertime because I never had anything to do. But recently I've learned that to have a good time, you have to create your own adventures.

I've got plans this year, which is a slightly encouraging thought. More to come soon.