under my skin

The good thing about crying at the gym is people can’t tell if you’re wiping tears or sweat from your face, if the salty, streaming fluid is coming from the eyes or under the skin.

Sometimes all the imperfection gets to me, the dead ants in the corner of my desk, the breakfast oatmeal caked on the kitchen table, the invincible black mold at the edges of the shower floor, the way we have a hard time looking one another in the eye and saying what we really feel.

Sometimes I wonder if PMS is merely what happens when a perfect storm of monthly hormones destroys our usual filters, allowing these buried desires, anxieties, and irritations to flow freely to the surface.

I read in a book that God has given all women holy longings for relationship--but these longings don’t always feel holy to me.

I think I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to be someone other than myself.

“Mediocrity is the best camouflage known to man.” --Bryce Courtenay

One cup of coffee no longer cuts it in the morning.

I bought a bar of dark chocolate and a bag of cheese puffs at the grocery store today.

In a pride of lions, it’s the female, not the male, that runs the show.  Turns out that heavy mane is just fluff and pretense.

God guided the Israelites with cloud cover by day, fire by night.  There has been no cloud cover, no rain here in over two months, and it’s the bright moon in a dark cloudless sky that lights our nights.

Why does everything have to mean something?

The AmTrak that runs through the fields behind our house severed a utility truck in half last week, sliced it right down the middle as if metal was butter.  I don’t know what happened to the driver.  It turns out that even red flashing lights malfunction.  Sometimes the warnings never come.

The daisies I planted in window boxes this spring didn’t survive the summer.  I plucked them out of the soil and threw their burnt bodies in the trash, replaced them with heartier begonias. 

I identify with daisies more than begonias.

“What I don’t understand is the beauty.”  --Dean Young

The colors grey and yellow, what an unlikely pair, an unexpected yet perfect marriage, coolness and warmth, the sun peaking through rain clouds.

Listening to Bon Iver puts me in a better mood every single time.

Of the five states I’ve lived in during the past decade, California is where I feel most like myself.

I’m afraid of living in the same place for the rest of my life.

How much longer can the human race go on like this before the ground falls out beneath us?

“It is impossible to write meaningless sequences. In a sense the next thing always belongs.  In the world of imagination, all things belong.” --Richard Hugo