i don't hate school this semester. this is only a brain bookmark. i will come back to this. for now, i need food and spark plug wires.

today my momma and i talked money. and it really freaked me out.

here's the thing, i'm a slack off student. honestly, as long as i pass, and some day have a degree to show for it, i'm golden. but then it registered just how much money was being exchanged here. last night i went out and drank too many long island iced teas and my mom's voice is chanting thousands through my cell phone at an all too early 11am, and something just sank in my stomach that I am spending this much money. this isn't just a bank or the u of i or mi madre, it's all me. my signature, my social security number, my soul owned for the next decade after i graduate. at least.
so, i get over. i understand that i am not a labor girl. i can not work long hours in a warehouse, i don't want to join to the army, secretary work does not appeal to me. school is mandatory for a lady of brains and motivation. however, i don't take school seriously because i see it as just this step. it's an investment, right? but i treat it like garbage. i set my laptop down for a movie a few times a week. instead of reading henry james, i cook dinner and dance in the kitchen with my boyfriend. fuck history, i'd rather get a beer with laura. i am spending thousands of dollars to not get enough out of it. i know that no one is going to ask me about portrait of a lady in a way my job depends on in the future, but i know there are skills i am not letting myself develop by ignoring so much of my work.

this is not one of those bold decrees that from now on out, i am THE student. pages of notes, hours of studying, long nights of black coffee and black texts burning that midnight candle. instead, it's a developing consciousness, an awakening to processes i am selling myself short on. it is true that i could be an all star student, honors, the whole bit. but i actively choose not to. why? what is going on here? and what do i do to fix it?

i choose love.

and, can not stop listening to blues and spending my summer nights ticking hours away with reading, writing, and beer drinking. all sorts of words in all their forms, and beer. and love.

Baby, why'm I worried now,
did someone make a fool of me
'fore I could show 'em how it's done?
Can't give up actin' tough,
it's all that I'm made of.
Can't scrape together quite enough
to ride the bus to the outskirts
of the fact that I need love.

There were times that I tried,
one for every glass of water
that I spilled next to the bed,
wretching pennies in a boiling well
in a dream that it once becomes
a foundry of mute and heavy bells.
They shake me deaf and dumb
say, "Someone made a fool of me
'fore I could show 'em how it's done."

It was so clear to me
that it was almost invisible.
I lie across the path waiting,
just for a chance to be a spiderweb
trapped in your lashes.
For that, I would trade you my empire for ashes.
But I choke it back, how much I need love...

memphis. now there's my kinda place. streets were packed, friendly people, beers i had to hold with two hands, dancing, dancing, dancing, mj in his early days, elvis, elvis, the blues. the muhfucking BLUES. real life, down to your toes, blues. the smell of bbq everywhere you go. and i don't even eat meat. but it's there. part of the soul of memphis. and if i had to say i left memphis with one thing, it's soul. a new kind i suppose. a gorgeous riverfront. the kind of people who stop you on the streets, and sun studio. ya know, a history i can personally understand and thank and get down on the floor to see where elvis stood and where johnny cash stood and jerry lee. that kind of history.

in my drunken rage, i told a 6-string bassist i finally get the blues. i still couldn't get it off my mind.
because now, i'm home. and i'm exhausted, headachy, vaguely smelly, and can. not. sleep. again. even in memphis i found myself looking out the hotel windows early while the rest slept. wondering what to do from here. if maybe bad decision making is a family thing. a genetic predisposition. and then the naseau. something i did not expect, that comes in waves, and leaves me thinking i may vomit but instead just sad.

but memphis, there's something i can smile at.

i got an email for a livejournal comment and held my breath while i read it. it was from timberland boots. the hardest i have laughed in a while.

I CAN NOT GET OFF THE DAMN INTERNET. it's, like, the internet brought me these woes. and now i expect the internet to resolve it. i am doing nothing. sitting on my bed. rabbits at my feet. waiting on answers.

we leave for memphis in less than 7 hours. i can't sleep. and can't make jokes. so i'm downstairs, alone, pretending to pack.

a lot of things happened today that i wanted to tell him about. something hilarious happened at the cafe tonight. like, fucking hilarious. and i grabbed my phone and hit 't.' it was my first reaction. and then i realized i don't do that anymore. i feel gutted in this way.

tonight i talked to an old friend about it, someone i'm not close to anymore but was at a very weird time in my life. he suggested i write down all my flaws, what i expect out of a relationship, what i expect out of myself, and then i get so blindly fucked up i don't remember it. the lists i can handle tonight. the rest i take care of in memphis.

the lists made me realize what it is exactly that i have done here, what it says about me at this point in my life, how absolutely stupid it was. but i guess i have learned. mistakes and flaws i am so highly conscious of right now--bright, red wounds that i hope scar so i never let them leave my mind. it was youth and vanity and bullshit. his advice would have served me nicely about this time last week, but i wouldn't have realized it without feeling this way. i hate that we are both so miserable right now. what good is this doing? 

today i left the house to walk to work, then remember i'm closing. closing necessitates bike riding or driving because state st at 10:30pm by myself is a scary thought. instead of going back home, i just kept walking. and walked home by myself. i find myself doing things like this lately. seeing what i'm capable of. i got home just fine. and the air felt fine. i am less afraid of the dark now.


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can't stop listening to this soooong.


MEMPHIS HELP ME

and then this one, because i think it's gorgeous although it's weird to hear my name. there aren't a lot of jeanine songs. and i like how it was introduced to me. one of my favorite, most genuine times in monmouth.

i am hesitant to write about days like today on a day like today.

mostly, i feel small. i feel very glad to be young, to be able to skip my classes and eat fruit on the cold stoop instead of listening to a lecture about how uncool our sun is compared to the other stars in the galactic playground, and about how henry james saw the world, which is pretty unhappy and bleak. especially when compared to writers like david foster wallace, who actually suffered real depression and still wrote positive things, goals, for the world ahead. even hemingway's characters got to fall in love before their lives sucked.

I WROTE THIS A LONG TIME AGO. seriously, that was april. April, one of the prettiest words. i have trouble deleting it. livejournal's draft saving mechanism keeps me holding into a lot of things that i find months later, and it feels so fragile and timed that i have to keep it somewhere. i choose this. last summer i gave up livejournal for tumblr's formatting. but now i just miss writing. especially now that i feel like i have so much to write about.

i have spent the past fiscal month sitting outside bars in flowy skirts, with my knees tucked to my chin, and my face glowy with humidity and pbr. both hands around a pint glass and my eyes wide open, eagerly meeting new people. i stumble home at last call, pass out in the front yard. i am that girl. we are too broke for food because we're saving for a trip to memphis, so i have had cigarettes for breakfast everyday for a week and sometimes one for lunch. sometimes we go to parties. sometimes we throw them. everyday we dance. some kind of celebration or hangover or joke.
at the fair, laura and i rode the tilt-a-whirl 7 times, and the scrambler 3. it wasn't even that it was enjoyable after the first few rides. i was dizzy and sick. my voice was thrown and scratched. but it felt good to just sit and be thrown around, to let my brains rack against my head and feel like shit and put myself through it and to lay face down on the couch and deal with it.
this is some kind of fucked off self-abuse for things i push down and let fester and the way people self-destruct, and i didn't even realize i was doing it. didn't know i was capable. but human i am and human i feel.

mostly, i still feel like i shouldn't write about days like today on days like today.
hopefully elvis has some good advice for me because i don't know how to think or what direction to go or how to even trust myself anymore. i keep making these thrown off decisions, and i just want to be held right now because i feel really strange and off balance and unsure of everything. everything. and i swore i wouldn't cry today.

writing here feels like some kind of novelty, but if i get verbose i don't like to weigh down tumblr. it seems to be crowd of pictures only: images that look to have been taken through fogged glass of ankles on mattresses or heavily-mascara'd women with their eyes on the ground. sometimes i wonder.

lately i am all kinds of stressed and funky and not as tired as i should be when i need to be and exhauasted when there's nothing i can do about it. my mind races from dropping out to getting hit by a bus with every page of an astronomy book i turn or paper about anne bradstreet and edward taylor i spit out. my alarm goes off, and i would rather be stabbed with a dull blade or eaten by fire ants. and then i realize what a whiney chump i am, and still, still complain. two semesters of creativing writing later, and i think my 15 year old brother had it right all along with "fuck my life."

the other day i went to the library and read the first page of every book i came across that i can't wait until summer to read.
this came from both an insatiable, unreachable, inexplicable desire for alone time, and feeling as if i am stuck somehow; that i need air and movement and sunshine, and all i've got is my laptop's backlight and a desk with arms that are awkwardly too high for my equally awkward short torso.
i want to read the awakening because i think it is beautiful and masterful, and honestly i mean it, i should have directed my college degree towards communications and women's studies so i can write for women's journals. i think that's where i belong. or politics. with emphasis on women's studies.
also, this side of paradise and anna karenina and the sun also rises and everything david foster wallace ever wrote and that steven millhauser book that i think is now in the back of trent's car. as many from as many different genres as i can fit into my eyes and brain and hands simultaneously.

mostly i am bored and restless and am spending all of my time directing thoughts towards the future. i want to find my boredom somewhere else for a while, and i am sick of fucking winters. i just want spring, and 50 degrees is not spring yet. there is no edge, no excitement, no sweeping romanticism, no racing heartbeat, no pulse in my throat, and it is my fault.

today i start reading the bell jar. i guess this means i can join the rest of the world? 
also, i picked up a copy of nabokov's the defense. i am not sure how i feel about his style yet; file under: to be determined and analyzed over a cup of coffee with the boo some cold, cold day in the near, near future.

for christmas, trent gave me a nikon n60 film camera. my life has been spent in the realm of digital and not having light and aperture and f-stop already determined is incredibly exciting. my elbows get quivery when i think about the stacks of library books about photography i can pour over during this dreary eight hour shift at espresso. it's too rainy for customers. the one lady who braved it is sitting by the fire place. she gave me her explicit permission to BLARE ben folds. this job has spoiled me to the core.
my half an hour in the library made me feel happier and more inquisitive than the u of i, which is okay. understandable. just how my gears turn.

these past few weeks have been marked by late night talks about where the rest of our lives are going: in bed, on couches, on the streets, here in this cafe. maybe it's the downsizing economy(which i can't even intelligently talk about) or turning of a new year, the fact that i'm on the edge of my teens, a semester after a transfer. something about this time feels pitted; like it's NOW to choose. i have options carved and limits ready to be laid down. setting up my own little mouse trap. i just want to end up with a nice collection of books and a decent cup of coffee everyday.

dear self,
promise yourself to not look back.
sincerely,
yourself.

p.s. sorry world, but i think i've turned into one of those girls who, like, thinks about her shoes and chooses perfume daily. i'm hoping this shift will, um, pay for some new boots, for instance. it was gonna happen eventually?