twenty-one.

Matthew DiVito makes gifs.

you have eighteen, I've got

I'm worn out, I can feel the bones in my lower back creaking against one another and under the library bathroom's fluorescent light, I just look tired.  I've written five exams and I have another tomorrow.

Last night I sat on my bed and I stared at the wall for thirty minutes.  I just wanted space to think and not think, drifting through daydreams and hazy half-lit ideas.  I stared at the wall for thirty minutes, and then I keeled over and fell asleep at 7.15.

My mind has completely retired, it's absenting itself from my body and abstaining from the vote.  I can't seem to corral my intellect into any kind of shape, it's drifting lazily on mental tides and washing against shores far distant from the contracts exam I have tomorrow.

fifteen thousand

Here are fifteen tiny stories or platitudes or ideas for you for the fifteenth.

The Strange and the Sweaty

First dates are a fascinating thing.  He sweat so much he soaked his shirt and had to put his sweater on.  He sopped his napkin and shook with nerves.  I did not see him again.

Chillaxin' and Maxin' All Cool

 Last night I learned that it is apparently not universal knowledge not to tell the girl you're dating that you think she's carrying a few extra pounds.  Luckily, though, you probably shouldn't worry too hard about that extra weight because I bet you five dollars you will never see her again.  Also, excuse me?

No, For Real

That's a real thing that happened.  To me.  Last night.

It Ain't Easy Feeling Feelings

And it is perfectly acceptable to not think about them until you have to.  Right?

Chemistry Set

Number six and I are still talking and I am still utterly charmed, a year later.

Pillows Like Lips

I'm obsessed with pillows, of all things.  Imagine how they could brighten the our apartment, whose walls are a dreamy and smoky cloud grey.  I want all manner of patterns and shapes.

I'm an Excruciating Embarrassment

"Visa?  Oh... Um.  No, I actually can't pay with my debit.  Well, I only have seven dollars, so maybe I don't need this... or this..."


You Just Want Me For My Intellect

When I leave the house sometimes I dress in my invisible outfit and I sneak through the streets like Harry Potter.  Try curly hair, glasses, harem pants, and a big sweater.  Your life will be free from voyeurs for one precious day.


I'm Straight (But It Might Just Be A Phase)

I wear a pin that says this on my housecoat.  We loudly denounce heterosexual scenes in movies in our house:  "Just disgusting, I mean do what you want, but don't flaunt it, okay!"

 At The Altar of Her Incompetence

My property law professor somehow managed to hand out the same exam for the final that she had posted online with answers a month earlier.  Should I feel bad that she might lose her job as this last-straws the formal complaint process already going forward?  Probably not, no.  She's bright, she'll find something else.  It shouldn't be on our shoulders to sacrifice our understanding of property law.

SFF: Supreme Friends Forever

I know all the supreme court justices' names, I pick favourites like a sports team.  McLachlin is of course my all time ace, you hear me?  And La Forest? That rogue!  Ritchie's a distant relative, which means heck we're practically siblings.  And you gotta be able to get behind L'Heureux-Dube, the prolific dissenter.  What a woman, she does what she wants.  When I do what I want it usually involves just involves eggnog.

To Be Lit Up

I think it would benefit all of us to spend more time thinking up album titles for our hypothetical band's second album.


Saying Hello to Strangers Gets Tiresome

I have a pair of pants that have a great deal to say to the world.  When I wear them, everyone smiles at them.  For some reason when people smile at your pants, they feel the need to smile at you, too.


Insufficient Sweetness

I skip sugar in both my coffee and my personality.

Can We Just Talk About Me For A Second?

As soon as any quote is ripped from its original resting place, it becomes awful and trite.  I'm sorry.

are you smiling?

queen of twelve hearts

The best things in the world are as follows:

1. I'm crushing on you and you're crushing on me too.

2. Meeting the fluffiest St. Bernard tied up outside a store.

3. "Hey girllll you got brains for days to go with those legs."  When I e-mail attachments to myself I include inspirational messages.

4. Macklemore.

5. Dogs parks on the ocean.

6. Did you know that I was the co-president of the Rappers And Poets Society (RAPS) in high school?  It's not a big deal or anything.

7. Not fucking anything up for a few days.  I make so many mistakes everywhere in my life that if I somehow sail smoothly for a couple of days I feel like a champion.  Look at me, ma, look at me!

8. Christmas is coming!  Let's have a side note about all the best things about the holidays: brunch on brunch on brunch, brothers, ski trails, and the ultimate party holiday: new year's.

That's all the best things.  Not all lists have to go to 10, ok?  Ok.

it is all I can do not to steal every dog I see.

tens up and eleven diagram

Hey, day ten, I saw you there.  Day nine wrote me another exam but I had fun with this one.  My professor calls it shooting rabbits, and I see what she's saying.  The exam is just a story full of problems and each problem is a rabbit.  Bang, bang, bang.  Battery, private nuisance, private nuisance, and suddenly I have a couple thousand words in my game-bag.  I spent my evening with teenage mutant ninja turtles II instead of property law, but even I can't argue a decision like that.

Day eleven, au jour d'hui.  Curly hair and library studies, I can't count how many cups of tea.  I've been buying Clipper tea because it comes in the most beautiful package.  A tiny work of art in my tea cupboard or backpack is worth the extra dollar or two, no?

Bonus: forget about diagramming and categorizing your relationships with the people you're attracted to if you don't care to diagram and categorize.  You can be neither here nor there with your feelings and that's just aces.

day 9

Sunday studying, smoking my dreams through filters.  My imagination is caught up with winter, a season this city has barely met.  I want to ski every day, I want to drink tea on the couch with my family, I want to walk down snowy side streets late at night with each of you.

Today I'm not concerned with my future, I'm thinking only about the next few weeks.  I'm dreaming of lazy nothingness and of ski trails and novels.  Hey holidays, get at me.

days on

Day seven wrote me an exam and I wrote it one back.  An exam is certainly not a love letter, that's about the only thing I learned.

Day eight is today.  I went for a walk to the dog park and the ocean and found clippings from evergreens on people's curbs and brought them home and put them in a giant jar.  I almost stole someone's perfectly round poofball of a pomeranian and I accepted a chewed on stick as a gift from a very small girl.

day six

Day six is all about west coast blonds.

advent-ure

two-feather just challenged me to a blog advent calendar with facts about my life.  Yikes I'm not sure I can promise to keep up with the dailys (that only goes for the roger's chocolate advent calendar my delightful roommate bought me) but I can give you some news about all the small right things in my life.

So what is it, day five?

Well, after having almost everything go wrong for a few days it turns out nearly everything is going right.

1. My nails are the perfect shade of grey-lavender.  I've decided that nail polish is absolutely worth a study break.

2. After spending nearly $2500 on an apartment I don't live in (oops...) turns out I'm getting it all back!  Great.

3. Gluten-free pretzels from boys.

4. I made up and made a perfect southwestern chicken soup that I'm still happy to pull out of the freezer a week or two on.  Somehow, somewhere along the line, I learned to cook.  I am not sure when this happened but I am pleased with it.


5. I'm just surrounded with really positive relationships right now.  I like everyone around me and I'm pretty sure that every one likes me.  The best sorts of ships are relationships, jah?  Haha ew, sorry.

activities

1. I still take eggs from the carton at random to annoy a boyfriend I broke up with two years ago and have barely seen since.

2. I step on all the cracks and always have.  In case the world falls apart at the seams, maybe my footsteps will somehow hold it together at the cracks.

3. Coffee tastes better when you put the cream in the cup before you pour the coffee.  Mixing cream in after you pour isn't the same.

4. Money comes and money goes.  It's not even a real thing.  Sometimes all you can do is laugh about your life.

5. I see a practitioner of traditional chinese medicine mostly so that I can refer to 'my herbalist.'  She keeps me in tinctures that come in small glass bottles, I take them morning and night.

at your request

Once we said that everything lands perfectly and I'm asking every god I've ever met for that to be true.

I'm dreaming these days of losing everything I know and selling cable knit sweaters in a well-decorated store for the rest of time.  Read books in the afternoons, scrounge money for yoga, burn candles and time, travel for six months a year.

Meanwhile I'm skidding along a gravel road, dragging and bumping through real problems that I've never really had before.  I'm closing my eyes and forgetting and dreaming of alternate reality that doesn't speak to who I actually might be at all.  

I just want to turn off time and reality for a second and turn off feelings, too.  I never want to grow up.

careful of the vast landscape

There's some sort of certain completeness that we're all not sure we're looking for almost all of the time.  It's a half-way all-the-time type of feeling, rightfully right like slotting your puzzle self into its place.  Click your shoulders back, straighten your spine, smooth your hair, cock your head to the side.  We're ambiguous at best and probably lost if it gets any worse, marching into place and in place.

I guess what I'm saying (I never know what I'm saying) is that there's a sense that everything might make sense.  Somehow we're looking for something to be sure about and meanwhile we're just not sure what that might be.  You might say it's a beautiful wonder and a beautiful wander, too, but I think sometimes I'd prefer illumination to beauty.  Turn on the floodlights, universe.  I can't complain about the wait (it hasn't been long) but I'm getting tired of searching and getting tired of feeling like I should be searching, too.

height five

It can be shitty being a tall girl in a short girl's world.  Height isn't feminine, you can't be tiny and adorable if you're tall.  Height is associated with masculinity, something most of us feminine-identifiers shy away from, something that the boys we're into shy away from too.

Someone on the internet said once that tall girls don't get to do cute, and I think that's true.  Sure, we can be striking, imposing, ferociously beautiful, but cute?  Incongruous and impossible.

We have a lot presence, us tall girls.  It's about handling physical might with grace and strength rather than slouched shoulders and a desperate attempt to be more like our friends around us.

The creative director of J.Crew, Jenna Lyons, is an absolutely legendary figure for the rest of us fashion-y tall girls.  She's 6'5 in heels and wears what the fuck she wants.  Her dark framed glasses match mine, but her impeccable sense of style outpaces my own by far.  She's been at J.Crew for 22 years, and in many ways has made the brand what it is today.  Nymag.com sums up the J.Crew look as "nothing too tight, too short, too synthetic."  Dream of dreams.

Lyons wears striped t-shirts with gold sequined trousers and perfect fuchsia lipstick.  She pairs mens shirts - unbuttoned to the sternum - with khaki pants and manolos.  She never shies away from heels, despite being taller than many NBA players while wearing them.  She ties her hair back and wears almost no make-up.  She twists femininity into severity, twists severity into laid-back, twists laid-back into high-fashion.  I adore her.

More than just a fashion icon, though, Lyons (pronounced lions, awesome) makes it okay to be tall.  She struts instead of shrinking and doesn't overfeminize in an attempt to compensate.  She makes me feel okay about my 5'11-ness, and that is something I'm incredibly grateful for.

interiosity

Today's a soft cloud, I'm not sure where I even am inside of it.  Finding the edges of my consciousness seems impossible, I'm drifting across smiles and foggy interiors. 

It's endless in here, such a strange and vast sky.  I can't see where the clouds meet the water in the horizon of my mind, everything is blurring into a faint and warm grey.

I cry too easily, I take rejection poorly.  I know a lot about myself and hardly anything about anything else.  I'm distracted by my thoughts before I even get out of my own head.

Someone tells someone else that the first person thinks this of the second and that someone else discussed it with the other person.  There's nothing there, so we hear.  Sometimes we need to hear and sometimes I'm not sure that we do.  Talk is cyclical, I forget anybody would bother with me.

#culturenotacostume

Courtesy of the UVic Native Students Union.

activist puns

I HAVE A HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA

BUT I LOVE HER ALL THE MORE FOR IT

sea of

Fuck, I'm in my twenties, indeed.

I spend my time flip-flopping between texting my best friend angstily about my love life and trying to take a perfect mirror photo of my centre part.  "Obsessed!"

I feel guilty when I feel dark and stormy, because clearly I have nothing to feel dark and stormy about.  Here's a rule: just because other people are sadder doesn't mean you can't be sad too.

I run to the bus every day.  I've yet to learn how to sit straight at my computer.

I'm part of a generation of communicators.  I find it insulting that anyone might think we don't connect anymore.  I'm constantly connecting with a network of people that I know I know I know and love.  If something defines us it's this, the mesh of discussions and half-thoughts and giggling fragments that flash across our phones and screens every day.

Fuck, I'm in my twenties.  I'm insulted that anyone might dare not to love me and simultaneously sure that no one does at all.  I'm every hour reassured with likes and hearts and even real life glances and also every hour breaking myself down and finding a thousand things wrong.

I'm used to getting what I want.

affirmation please

story of my life

I'm obsessed with www.fuckiminmy20s.tumblr.com.

permutations and expectations

I have a fleet of friendships.

It might make it easier to create a graph, left right and centre with colours and categories.  (If you've ever seen my agenda, you know I love colours and categories.)

There's a few stragglers from elementary school and my early days.  One or two girls I still have genuine smiles for when I run into them at Christmas or when our parents have dinner together.  There for my first crushes (I've been boy crazy since day one) and for learning how to use mascara and staying up late reading comics.

Middle school brought me my best friend, a girl I know inside out.  She glares a frostily glowing princess glare at me from my wallet every day and I smile back at her every time.

Too many of my high school friends are now either mostly forgotten or friendly acquaintances but there's still a few friends I'd fight for.  You know the ones you have warmth for in your heartest heart even when you don't see them for months?  The Cheshire Cat, MirKat, and M. Pratt - they know who they are. 

University socked it to me with beautiful party girls who love nature and boys equally, an army of girls impossible to know and impossible not to know.  We were who we are and we loved every second of it, rolling as an unstoppable unit and leaving a trail of broken glasses and broken hearts in our wake.  I was and am inseparably a part of this foursome, fivesome, sixsome, tensome.

University brought me my boys, too.  My bestie straight-boy boo who knows who he is and tells me my failings without blinking and keeps me on the even every time. I'm not sure that anyone but us understands our friendship but it definitely depends on a mutual understanding of whiskey and beards.

Law school girls and boys are still just settling in through the cracks, a pressing and pleasant weight on my heart.  The warmth and vivacity is insane and the intellect on these people is unquestionable.  My tribe, absolutely, who can out-think and out-work anyone but always still have time for a glass of wine and laughter for days.

The others fit in here and there - the girls I've met at work over the years, travelling friends, my Americans and Australians and Spaniards and Belgians from exchange.  The girl at the grocery store who complimented my outfit and the girl next to me on the plane who was flying home for the same stupid reason as me.  Every single one of these people is a fibre of who I am (or maybe who I'm trying to become) and I am thankful every day for their existence.  If you're out there and I love you, I love you.  Thanks.

 

 

this was an era, am I right

the baby duck girl house has its first family photo

these girls always.