dots

Every now and then when my eyes are tired from being open all day, I look down at my laptop and in between the keys, there are little black dots. I'm watching an optical illusion perform: every time I focus on a dot it disappears.

Every now and then, when I'm tired, I try to focus on my reasons for being thankful, the reasons why I should be happy. Sometimes it's like an optical illusion and I can't focus on anything in particular, the reasons escape me. But when I wake up in the morning, and the sun is rising, and I see the world outside my window, the reasons flood back. They're not solid things that I can touch or see with my hazel eyes, but they do exist. Quite a lot of them exist.



p.s. I went salsa dancing

5:54 A.M

Guess where I was at 5:54 this morning? hint: the fire alarm was going off.

Yup, not even the first real day of college yet and I'm out in my PJs with a bunch of other crusty eyed freshmen. We were all hoping really hard against a real fire, I mean, my stuff was moved in yesterday, a lot of it is new, and it's located on the thirteenth floor.
Good news: I met a few more girls on the way down those flights of stairs.

thunderstorm warnings

So quickly the gray faded in to replace the innocent blue of the sky today. Do you ever feel thankful for the rain? It's an excuse for staying inside and reading or thinking or daydreaming on the couch. During camp it confines us all, campers and counselors, to the interior of the JCC, and then there are rain day boundaries: less places to go and for campers to run off to.

Not to mention, rain makes the air smell chilled, like the slight cold that lingers on the top of your glass of water when the ice cubes have just finished melting.

tree 3

Like an angry apple tree, I throw my apples if you get to close to me.
If I look to my right, will I see the one I fight for? If I look to my right.
or If I turn to my left, will I see that I have kept my heart locked up, locked up so tight?

you grabbed my wrist
and pulled me into a hug

you made my day

spoken

In English class a little while ago, Mr. Tarmey asked us all why we procrastinate. Of course we all came back with the obvious reasons: too much extra-curriculars (which led to the putting after school activities as priority discussion), too much homework from all the teachers combined, and laziness and procrastination for the few who admitted to it. Well, today I called a friend and voiced a thought that had been bothering me every now and then since that class. Though some of those other reasons apply to me without a doubt, one of the biggest reasons that I personally wait and put off work, especially critiques and other large papers, is because it gives me an excuse. When I wait until the last minute, even though it is my fault, there is a solid reason why I got the grade that I did. I am afraid. Fearful that if I put significant amounts of time and effort into research that brings me into the murky, pithy depths of a topic, giving all of my time and effort into a product that I should be proud of, that the grade will not be satisfactory simply because my best wasn't good enough.

So there's my fear, and now that it's spoken, maybe I can overcome it- realizing that my best can get better with time.

snow, snow balls, snow blowers

So today started off pretty good. You know that feeling that you get when you're a kid and there was the possibility of no school the night before? That anticipation deep in the pit of my stomach was there this morning. I didn't even have to look out the window. My alarm went off at 6:00, I turned it off planning on sleeping for another five minutes. At 6:16 I heard no one stirring across the hall in Amy's room or my mom's room. I reluctantly pulled the covers back and padded on over to my parents' room where my mother jerked awake when I said her name and mumbled no school. I didn't need any more telling to go and hop right back into my cocoon of covers. Around 9 I finally got up for real and practiced piano while pancakes were being made for breakfast.

An hour later saw the females of the Collins family shoveling their way to the back of the house where we planned to clear the deck... why the deck and not the driveway? Two reasons: 1. we planned on having dad snow blow the driveway and more importantly 2. The cats need to be able to play outside. I shoveled the entire deck for the cats.

Before we finished there was a snowball fight of course; you can't shovel this kind of snow, the snow is perfect for it, without one.

I finally abandoned my shovel, sweating in my rain coat (the winter coat was too hot), and sat down at the piano again. From the garage I could here the struggling sounds of the snow blower not starting. When dad finally realized he simply didn't turn on the gas, we all let out a sigh of relief... Dad's not pretty when he's in a bad mood. Unfortunately, the good mood did not last long, because only ten minutes later I was called out to help him: the newspaper is halfway eaten in the snow blower as we speak with no signs of being thrown up. There are little shreds littering the driveway. I found the Sudoku and what I think is a piece of the Peanuts comic.

salty tears

salty tears
crept
down my cheeks
leaving the skin tight
parched.

I couldn't explain
or reason

those salty tears
had all of my focus
slipping slowly
daring me to wipe them away

I couldn't speak
nor did I want to

salty tears,
sometimes
they are enough

I could continue.

be

this is how it could be,
this is how it should be,
this is how I want it to be,
well, I'll just have to wait and see,
let it be,
let time continue serenely,
let it be,
truly,
sincerely,
me.

whose doorway

I was thinking, what would it be like to return home to someone else's house? I would know which steps creak on my way up the stairs, which switches belong to each light, the distance from wall to wall in the upstairs hallway, and the loudness of the shower late at night. Who would I be? How would I feel walking through the garage door or would there even be a garage door? There are so many enormous and minuscule discrepancies between my life and another's. I will never know someone the way they know themselves. Even if they don't know how well they know themselves, or at least the places where they walk, run, dance, jump, cry, angrily or joyfully live out every single day. There are specific people who come to my mind immediately. Whose faces fill with feeling and expression whenever I look at them, and yet, I will never look out of their eyes or find that their passions are exact copies of my own.

I don't know. I'm just thinking. Inside my head, outside my head. Yeah.