I snuck a camera onto the trail.......

........and these are some pictures that I took. I was only out there from a Friday evening to a Monday afternoon, and I had to hide my camera, so these are some pictures I took while I was making radio check-ins, et cetera--anytime I was wandering around by myself. These may be interesting or they may not be. Either way, here they are.

Due to some dental-emergency-type errands I have to run repeatedly in the next two weeks, I found out I don't have any more full weeks on the trail left. Just a couple more Friday-to-Mondays. It's bittersweet, but we're on fire restrictions now anyway....fires have been replaced by stoves. We still have to bust a coal with saguaro and seep willow and blow the coal into flame with tinder, but once the stove is lit, the tinder bundle is stamped out. It's actually a positive thing, in some ways. Everyone learns to bust coals quickly and efficiently and you never run out of tinder since you can re-use the same bundle a half-dozen times. I busted two coals a day the last week I was out. Anyway, blah blah blah. Pictures of the desert, for anyone with the time to glimpse them:

Here's a picture of my pack. The straps are made out of my army-issued sleeping burrito--what I put my sleeping bag in at night for added warmth. Mine is pretty ripped up.

People claim you can use hooked needles from this cactus to go fishing.

Along with stoves, gaiters are also back for the summer. They supposedly protect against rattlesnake bites, but considering a high majority of bites occur on the arms, face, and hands of men between the ages of 15 and 35 (I'm making half of that up, I think) I'm not sure why our ankles are at such a huge risk. But I like mine because they make me look like I'm wearing bellbottoms and I can run through catclaw mimosa with them.

Much of the wildflowers are clamming up for the summer, but they are being replaced by blooming cacti. Really, really beautiful. And many are edible. Ocotillo is blooming, too.






Oh, and grape leaves are EVERYWHERE. They are a sour treat for any summer hike...they are literally everywhere. I am never not eating grape leaves during summer hikes.

Here's Squaw Butte.

And this is the picture of me when I was in that polygamist colony in southern Utah. I was fourteen and was the seventh wife of a man named Isaiah Jacob Brenneman. Surely I told you guys about that before, right?

Top Twenty Overprostituted Guilty Pleasures

Today did not work out as planned. I missed everything I was supposed to make it to today. It was one of those domino effects....being late to one thing kept me from hitting the next...I ended up spending unnecessary money and wasting time. Just one of those rotten days. But--I never got hit by a car, no one told me that they hated me, I didn't kill any babies. So it could have been worse. WAY worse.

In any case, I feel like somewhat of a waste of space today and it makes me a bit confessional. So here it is. CONFESSIONS.

There is a list of over-played, over-prostituted songs one might hear on the radio that I never tire of. Some of these songs that I love so dearly I will openly admit are repulsive and even poor-quality and I agree with you on how hokey and horrible and despicable some of them may be. But. For some ungodly reason, whenever one of these songs comes on the radio, not only am I pleased to hear it, I get these tingles of excitement that YES, I LOVE this song, they are playing this song for ME, and even while I am thinking this very thought, I also know that I would take that secret with me to my grave. That is, until tonight.

So without further ado, the top 20 list of over-played songs that I will never get sick of, that I will never not want to dance on the tables to, songs that I will turn up loud when I'm driving or doing the dishes just so long as no one else is around, songs that I will scan classic rock and easy listening stations for, songs that I hope people ask Delilah to play for them. *commence kazoo fanfare*


20. Dancing in the Moonlight -- Toploader
19. Crash -- Dave Matthews
18. I'm Not Your Stepping Stone -- The Monkees
17. Play Me -- Neil Diamond
16. Time After Time -- Cyndi Lauper
15. Cat's in the Cradle -- Harry Chapin
14. From a Distance -- Bette Midler
13. Kiss from a Rose -- Seal
12. Everything I Do -- Bryan Adams
11. Everybody Wants to Rule the World -- Tears for Fears
10. Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime -- Paul McCartney
9. Return to Pooh Corner -- Kenny Loggins
8. More Than Words -- Extreme
7. Place in this World -- Michael W. Smith
6. Yesterday -- The Beatles
5. Yellow Brick Road -- Elton John
4. Forever Young -- Alphaville
3. I Saw the Sign -- Ace of Base
2. I've Got My Mind Set on You -- George Harrison
1. For the Longest Time -- Billy Joel

So go on, judge me. Bring it. These songs have faithfully made me grin since before I even hit puberty. I love them! I will never tire of them! I want them played at my deathbed! ...Maybe!! So dish it out now, you hypocrits. What are your guilty overplayed pleasures that you pretend like you hate but secretly get all stoked up from. I'm sure we share some.

(Post Script: I wanted to place Cat's Peace Train and Gordon's Carefree Highway to the list, but they aren't quite as despicable as the rest, though they are quite overplayed. Consider them honorary mentions.)

I bet Etta Place really did teach English for a while.......

Fate has spoken. The stars have aligned. I am taking a less-traveled road that will one day seem to have made all the difference, after all. A boarding school with a campus in Saratoga Springs and a campus in Spanish Fork has asked me to be their English teacher, beginning June 16th (the Europe trip once again being placed on hold). The students are at-risk girls, much like who I'm working with here in Arizona, and the school specializes in equine therapy....horse whispering or something akin. I'm going to be a real English teacher. Today is a gloriously sunny day. I'm to begin choosing texts immediately...I can teach whatever I want, whomever authors/poets I want, and during the summer, Friday is fieldtrip day and I can take them wherever I want. They've asked me to check out what plays are being performed in Cedar City this summer--I get to teach Shakespeare and then take my girls down to see the play in August.....this thrills me. I'm too blessed. I'm incredibly excited.

And I may be moving to Provo, God forbid it. My Provo readers need to give me an honest appraisal of the Utah county situation and if I shouldn't head on towards Springville or Lehi or even commute from further north to avoid the legions of BYU freshmen that will force me into an early grave (considering I am an ancient old maid already to most of them)....I know there's at least two of you out there....come on Provonians, tell it to me straight.

I'm sad to leave Arizona. I'm quite certain that I'll end up living in the Utah deserts during evenings and weekends. I'd really like to learn to fly fish. Are there places to fly fish near Spanish Fork? I hear the rock climbing is all right, too. I like to think that I'll be living out my next few years like a young Katharine Ross......26-year-old English teacher hanging out with Western outlaws and keeping them in line while I help them bust into South American banks, and then, hopefully, I'll find a Dustin Hoffman to burst into the temple doors someday yelling, "Emily! Emily!" and waving a large wooden cross so I don't end up marrying some strange Provo man I don't really love. It will be very dramatic I hope, and I will be very beautiful. Fingers crossed! Anyway, just wanted to lay down the word--I'm moving back to Utah. *cue very formidable and conclusive metal door slamming shut*

Thoughts on mistletoe.....

After six months of reminding myself to research mistletoe from seeing it suck away at the lives of junipers and cottonwoods in the desert, I finally did a little low-key research on this parasitic symbol of love and courtship. Thought it might make an interesting blog. We'll see.

So it ends up that mistletoe most likely derives from the German Mist meaning dung and Tang meaning branch, reason being that birds eat the seeds, crap them out onto branches where they sneak their way into the tree's core a la Sigourney Weaver's nemesis in Alien. After five weeks or so of digging their way in chigger-style, the mistletoe copycats the tree's branch scheme as well as it can and sprouts itself from the tree, oddly brighter and yellower in color and dropping white, semen-filled berries for further domination. According to my friend Dodge as he told it apathetically to my band of girls one sunny afternoon in November, the mistletoe, like the romance it represents, will find a host and feed on it until both the tree and the mistletoe weaken and die together, leaving only the broken shell of the original tree and wilted rotting mistletoe all around the ground beneath it. Oh what baggage, oh what destruction. Oh, the sentimentality of it all!


In the areas of the desert I have walked, mistletoe leaves a bloody trail of leafless branches stretching bare and naked toward the sky while several clumps of mistletoe leech away at their last breaths, mocking the host trees by bearing their own leaves and fruits that deny the tree its own posterity. My girls used to gather the mistletoe to hang in our camps during the Christmas season, but we somberly quit as we followed the path of arboreal carnage the mistletoe parasites left in their wake. Hanging mistletoe felt like celebrating the Charles Manson of trees, like honoring the vampiric extent this plant takes for survival. And it surely made us at least half as cynical about love and romance as our friend Dodge was.

We most likely owe the Vikings for the kissing traditions. Balder was the Viking god of the summer sun (this legend makes for an appropriate Arizonan April trail tale). Anyway, Balder dreamed he was going to die. His mother flipped out because she knew that if Balder died, everything on the earth would die with him. Her name was Frigga and she was the goddess of love and beauty. Since she's Viking, let's assume she would kick Aphrodite's ass if they cage fought each other.


Well, Frigga did what only a mother would think to do, and she went to all the plants and animals on the planet and asked that they would be kind to her son because he was a good boy. The consequences of Mom's words were typical--it was as bad for Balder as it was for any young boy who walks towards to the junior high's front doors only to have his mom call out, "I love you, Pumpkinpants!" in front of all the jocks that hang out in the foyer until twenty minutes into first period--Balder had more rocks thrown at him in teasing than any of the other young gods and goddesses. Frigga was pretty powerful, though, so nothing worse than broken eyeglass rims ever happened to him.

That is, until this other boy god, Loki, found out that mistletoe had no sway against Frigga's power because mistletoe was not plant or animal as it has no roots of its own, no identity without a branch to leech from. Loki was as low as you could go......I'm not sure who would win a cage fighting match between Loki and Shakespeare's Iago. That's how bad. Loki not only made a poisoned dart from the mistletoe but he also tricked Balder's blind brother Hoder to shoot it into Balder for him. Balder died. Loki was a real bastard.

Here's where those tried and true Christianity parallels and Jung's collective unconscious comes into play. Three days after Balder jumped the Great Boa as they say somewhere, Frigga's tears washed the mistletoe's red coloring off from all its berries and washed them white as snow (or white as semen most Druids would say) and this miraculously raised Balder from the dead. Frigga was so thrilled and grateful for mistletoe afterward that whenever she saw it she got so damned excited she'd kiss anybody and everybody standing underneath it. Which is kind of a nice story and I like that kind of kissing more than the awkward, aw geez, we're both standing under the mistletoe...are we supposed to make out? type of kissing mistletoe pushes these days.


So, a happy ending. Also, it ends up mistletoe isn't so bad after all, botanically speaking. Mistletoe among juniper trees, for example, actually encourages more juniper berries to sprout before the tree chokes up under the mistletoe's grip. More birds and animals come for more juniper berries and the result concludes with more animals and juniper trees in that area than before the mistletoe arrived. What a paradox, huh? Also, mistletoe from some trees are so plush and bunchy that birds get giddy over them and make their nests there in the high branches. So, that seems positive.

Conclusion: love is a leech that can suck you dry and the romance might well die right along with your soul. But cry it out and you will live again. Sure. That's the way this big round ball keeps on keeping on. There are times and there are seasons and there's always another spring and another. We can only hope that if we are so lucky for romance and mistletoe to stick its parasitic tentacle against the soft meshy skins of our metaphysical aortas, that at least we can have the strength to live with these growths long enough that we both survive to fill our neck of the woods with plenty of birds' nests and juniper berries and happy little animal families a good long while. Then, if we all die together, it's romantic and meaningful, just like Old Dan and Little Ann, those timeless beloved coondogs that couldn't live without their love, and a red fern grows between them. The only book I ever saw my father cry in. So that's something. Mistletoe. Finally researched it.

Easter on the Verde

This is the time to be stuck in the Sonoran Desert.......I cannot even adequately describe to you how beautiful and warm and breezy and chock full of life the desert was last week. Not even remotely adequately. I spent hours on my back atop grassy hills covered in purple honey-filled papago lilies (pic. 1 at bottom), totally edible, totally delicious, grazing....my mouth full of the sugary blue dick flowers, staring up at the stacked cumulus clouds spotting a starkly bright blue sky.....nothing but red rock, long slim sycamore branches with green buds slowly unfurling themselves....I tanned myself, lying beside the Dirty Verde River (yes, we pronounce Verde to rhyme with Dirty where I be), letting my fingers dangle in the water that was cool and lazy. It is a sheer crime that I get paid to do this.

My band of girls was exceptional. There were seven of them--some were practically Paris Hilton status and even attended the same parties as said celebrity, and others were there on rich and dying grandparents' money and came from more humble backgrounds. I love those girls. We laughed hard last week and it felt good. We had to cross the Dirty Verde--twice--and the second time nearly took us under, trying to swim through currents dragging our fat packs behind us before they completely filled with water, soaking our sleeping bags, food packs, thermals for the evening chill. But we survived that, ate some de-thorned Christmas berries (pic. 2 at bottom) and spent the starlit nights dancing barefoot in sand around bonfires built from driftwood, howling at the full moon and celebrating Easter by rising early to watch the moon set and the sun rise at the same moment. Like being caught between the meeting of two old friends, my hippie friend Troy once said. That morning we each took a rock we had carried in our pockets on our hikes that represented a heavy thing of the heart that weighed us down and we dropped them in the water and left them behind. I didn't want to let go of mine and held it longer than most. I hate letting go--I hate it hate it hate it hate it hate it. I don't even think I officially did let go completely.........but I let go of enough. I let it slip from my fingers and watched it disappear beneath the deep green waters of that river that the day before I had cursed so frantically when I thought the current would take me under until I realized I was nearly to the opposite shore.

I ended the week hanging out with my friend Price and watching gila monsters creep about the top of the cactused hill as the sun was setting Wednesday evening. A gila monster hissed at me--it was like staring into the face of a dinosaur, and I marveled at how it contorted and flattened its thick spotted body to crawl beneath the spokes of a fat prickly pear cactus when I saw what he was hunting--a tiny three-inch bite-size bunny rabbit. Almost too ironic of an ending for an Easter week on the trail. The little guy was scared, but also pretty chill and he didn't put up much of a fight when I reached into the thistled bush he was hiding in and picked the bunny up. The poor gila monster hissed one last time at me and sulked down the road in search of new prey while I cooed and purred over this smallest bunny ever that sat just as comfortable and content as could be in the palm of my hand.

Now, since I was a kid I liked to think I had some kind of special relationship with animals...I blame the boy in The Secret Garden who could talk to crows and foxes. I can't say that this bunny and I had any kind of special or spiritual connection and that's why he let me hang out with him like I did......but I can't deny that the experience affected me pretty profoundly. He was such a little fluffy guy...he eventually felt good enough to stretch his neck around and hop around a little bit in my hands. I lay on the ground with some sprouted lentils and piece of carrot on my chest, just in case he felt like eating. The bunny hopped up my arm and nestled himself between my chest and my shoulder and rested his chin there. Price, tell everyone how small this little guy was.

I had all these quick fantasies about taking the bunny home with me and raising it like one of my own, like those Disney movies about boys raising baby lions or wolves or bears or the like. This little rabbit and I found each other and we would be a real striking pair, the two of us. Any fears about the future and education and vocation and marital relations and all of that would be numbed and softened because my bunny and I had each other. But alas, I let someone else hold my bunny while I took a walk with a friend and when I returned the bunny had left, they had let him go.

It's for the better. That's obvious, I'm no dummy. The bunny would have died in a week. He probably would have refused to eat. The gila monster probably has him by now. Or maybe my scent that he carries makes all the other bunnies fear him now and he is as much a renegade of his species as I sometimes describe myself to be. The car ride home alone would have stressed him out, and who wants to live in a cage.

But am I so ridiculous to harbor a secret desire to run into my bunny again during my desert adventures? Would it be so silly to wonder if some rabbit some day that I find staring at me with ears perked across the cow tank isn't my little bunny that I saved from the death-vise grip of a gila monster? The smallest bunny I ever did see. It's a crime I get paid for what I do. And might I also add--the desert may be empty and open and blank to some, but this desert is so thick with emotion and memories and fears and gratitude and secret morning meetings and late night fire circles and bleeding hearts and belly laughs that I am becoming almost pained to return again and again to the same gravelly creeks and lonely peaks and lost caves. I miss my friends who have moved on or who are moving on. I am sad that I will soon be that one to leave the desert behind as well. I guess we can't all be Edward Abbey forever. I wonder what Ed Abbey would have thought of that bunny. I'm quite sure he would have been more inclined to raise the gila monster, and he likely would have began by feeding the bunny to it.


To anyone interested, here's a bunch of the rich life I was privy to witness on the trail this week. The pictures aren't mine, as we aren't allowed cameras, but these fine folks of the Internet took better pictures than I could have anyway.

What am I doing in Casablanca, man?

Somebody was talking to me about catharses and what they're good for. I said they were good for clearing the stage of people at the end of Shakespeare's tragedies. But in retrospect, I think catharses breed people instead of chasing them away. These past 72 hours have illuminated a lot of pain from my friends that I haven't noticed because I've been so muddled up and reigned into my own selfish hands as I've tried to fingergrab any last remnants of something dead because I can't face losses, I can't let go. And all I see is what I'm grabbing for. I don't even notice whether or not or how it even wants to be grabbed...maybe it wouldn't be so difficult if I was only supposed to walk alongside it after all. Like trying to push a horse. A real mule-headed horse.

In any case, my hands are free. I should have gone rock climbing today because I'm fat from eating cake and I go out on the trail tomorrow, but I don't trust my fingers yet. I heard from old friends this week, good friends, some here some there and they were all hurting. Not desperately or disgustingly, but when they spoke I felt it in their voices and saw it in their eyes....I had good conversations these past few days about life and goodness and light and friendship. I learned about fights these friends were fighting that I had been completely oblivious to. I confided all my guts to my mom and she not only held them there so gently and forgivingly, she even brushed them off a bit and showed me some of her guts and how they healed up real nice just like mine would. So forgive me for throwing temper tantrums (which anybody real close to me has been privy to countlessly) and forgive me for trying to sound profound here. I just wanted to declare hope for the children and light in the distance and chocolate sundaes in heaven. I connected with people in the most raw ways and I feel clean and washed out from it. Today is a good day. Today is beautiful in Arizona and I wish all of you in the cold states could feel the summer in my parking lot. It is a good day.

It's better than Goofy Golf.

As I make my laborious yet lethargic way towards something like a Career this fall, I'm reminded of my true calling in life: Paranormal Studies. The smallish library at Sarah Jane Adams Elementary School had a surprisingly, perhaps even alarmingly, ample access to nonfiction books that had researched the weird, the terrifying, the unexplainable. After my fourth grade teacher told me I wasn't allowed to check out any more Roald Dahl books (I was reading Danny, Champion of the World for the third time) I memorized the numbers of the Dewey Decimal System that covered Cryptozoology and rarely had to visit the card catalog again. (Actually, Mrs. Siler made me check out a stupid book called Grandpa and Me first and I was so angry that I wasn't reading The BFG that I was actually partially pleased when Grandpa died at the end.)

Amid the dozens of reports on dolphins and wolves in 7th grade, when Mrs. Draper told us to write a report on any animal we'd like to research further, I whipped out a deeply engaging and well detailed five-page, double-spaced essay on the Loch Ness Monster. It was one of the only times during my awkward era that I felt proud to stand before a class of my peers in my Tweety Bird sweatshirt and knee-length, blue-and-white striped shorts. The kids actually had questions for me after I read my report and I think they were grateful not to have to listen to yet another long list of facts about horses and what they eat and shouldn't eat. Remember that this was still the decade that aired both the ending of Unsolved Mysteries and the beginning of The X-Files. We were the generation that grew up fantasizing about proton packs and 1.21 gigawatts. My 9th grade report on Bigfoot in 1997 was similarly received.

Even then I was cynical deep down, however. I knew Santa Claus wasn't real when I was eight, but it took me until 6th grade to admit it. I wanted Nessie to be real because I wanted to believe that people wouldn't just flat out lie. I wanted to believe in honesty and in the human spirit. If a Scottish minister said he was picnicking and saw a sea monster's long neck surface, rise, then gracefully and gently dip back below into the murky dark water, then he very well could have, damn it. Why make something like that up and take it to your grave? I could write a whole other post on taking things to the grave. I don't stand behind that as any kind of evidence anymore. Say something long enough for enough years and you can hypnotize yourself. Plus, most people go somewhat crazy just before the grave, anyway.


That's the real pull behind cryptozoology, I think. Part of it is adventure and the thrill of discovery, of course, but if anybody ever did finally snag a sasquatch, that would make hundreds of people honest, sane, and credible witnesses instead of crazies and liars. I remember being so angry when books would post pictures of the legendary creatures and then write about how they were hoaxes after all, and here are the men who staged them. I'm pretty sure, though, that had I been around at the time, I would have helped them out. The only thing that interested me more than the truth as a kid was being involved in secrets. Except I've never been good at taking things to next week, let alone to my grave.

"Did you ever have to finally decide......"

Bleah.

Sometimes when I am mourning a loss, particularly a great one that I basically caused myself, I undergo this period of sick, stupid, horrible nostalgia. Not even just for the person/place/thing I no longer get to keep. I go WAAAAAAAY back, hoping to find myself again in old metal lunchboxes and stuffed Grover dolls. It's an illness, I think, and I hope I don't end up like that old crone in Dicken's Great Expectations with forty-year-old wedding cake cobwebbed up like gray lace sitting in her parlor and a perpetually pissed-off, hopeless character sketch. Sheesh.

But I don't think that'll happen. I don't feel too pissed off or hopeless right now. I'm super, super sad. And I hate all things Groundhog Day. What a stupid holiday. Oh man....to even think that I would have to relive this year's Groundhog Day over and over and over and over again sends bile to the back of my throat. At least I can be grateful I didn't wake up to Sonny and Cher this morning...It's definitely February 3rd, hallelujah.

What I was going to say, though, is that it's getting to be spring around here in Mesa. And how can anybody really be all that glum when your parking lot smells like new plants and there's the constant whistle of birds in the background? So I watched a bunch of dumb YouTube videos of classic Sesame Street. I doubt any of you will actually go in and watch them, but look, that's all I'm offering this off-week. I think. All I'm offering today, anyway. In the buzzing, dramatic, swollen recesses of my bloody little heart, these clips resonated a little bit of good cheer back into me and I feel completely confident about advertising them here, on my blog, to you, my good friends.

The first is a creepy one about getting honey from bees. I remember it had the same effect on me as a kid as nature shows about spiders did. Uneasy background music and it sounds like it's being narrated by one of the Children of the Corn. I love it. The second is a strong, meaty classic--Madeline Kahn and Grover hang out together. This is probably the strongest attachment I have to Sesame Street, this clip I mean. This is part of the reason I still carry that damn dirty Grover doll with me wherever I pick up and move to and also the reason I love Kahn so much. Sesame Street was such a sweet show.....why and when did they let Elmo take it over? Everything good in the world these days is losing heart to the sucking maw of commercialism. Damn you, Tickle Me Elmo. Damn you to the fiery depths of hell's seventh circle.

Finally and thirdly, how do you guys expect me to act this foolishly and immaturely and NOT throw on a clip from Pete's Dragon. So here's Petey and Helen Reddy singing sweetly and taking me back, all the way back to my old house in Salt Lake, the one where I had a lovebird named Bird G. who used to play in my hair while I sat in front of this stupid movie with my perpetual little kid snotty nose. I'm so damned glum. And don't get me wrong....I know my life is barrels and bushels and trenches better than most people's--I'm thick with good friends and plush blessings and sunshine. But somehow that still doesn't make this any less crappy. You guys know how I am about letting things go, even if I am lucky enough to keep a good friend out of the whole ordeal. If I were Harrison Ford in the Last Crusade, I'd STILL be lying there with my middle finger just barely grazing the edge of that wooden cup.

If anyone needs me I'll be making myself sick off Jim Croce and trying to find a copy of Better Off Dead. Jen, where are you with Steel Magnolias when I need you? I need a good Weezer to sock in the nose (laugh, laugh, laugh then cry some more...you know the drill).

Oh, ye'll take the high road an' I'll take the low road...

**DISCLAIMER: This post isn't intended to have hidden messages or jabs to the ribs. I'm just trying to be therapeutic here. What do I even have this thing for if I can't use it to get something off my chest. That said, carry on.**

It's interesting to me how quickly changes happen. For the first time since I made the decision, I regret not being in Japan right now. I would give a finger off my left hand (preferably the second to the last) to have nothing to do right now but plan an English lesson, ride my mamachari to buy twelve different kinds of mushrooms for my miso shiru at the local grocery and watch Japanese game shows from my teeny tiny Asian apartment.

Well, even as I type that, I know it's a lie. I wasn't supposed to go to Japan, damn it. I can't even hypothetically wish myself there without my stomach saying, "No! No! Don't you remember?! That's what we're NOT supposed to do!" So where the hell am I supposed to be then, Universe? Where?

But back to change--I guess it isn't change really. Just reality. Really. What I'm trying to say is, I wish I were back in school. As a student, most of my disillusionments were about other people....Wordsworth's disillusionments or Buddhism's disillusionments or my own disillusionments about something somewhat separate from me...like me becoming disillusioned about Greece or Turkey or some other far off person/place/thing. Now that it's just me, myself, and I sans textbooks and professors and students, my disillusionments are mostly about myself. I hate them. I'm sick of being under my own microscope. Someone give me something to research, something to write about besides my own dramatics.

So, in order to stay on the bright side of things, here is a list I am making myself write of ten things I can say I am honestly grateful for:

1. I'm not married.
2. I don't have to stay in Arizona forever.
3. I can be anywhere I want this fall. I just have to pick a place and find a job. People do it everyday. I'm going to be one of those people.
4. I am not who I was in 8th grade. Not even close.
5. I have never been in a plane wreck on the Andes.
6. I am not dead yet and thus still have ample probationary time to get righteous. Maybe. I guess nobody knows when they are going to go. Let me rephrase with: I'm grateful for probationary time. Period.
7. I get to see my family tomorrow. I get to take William to a movie.
8. I am in Sharon Morgan's house right now with Patch the Dog on my lap. This is one of the only places in the world I can feel consistently safe in. I think that this house can breathe, deep deep down. Maybe in the furnace or the water heater. But it definitely sighs from all that's happened and been discussed and been whispered inside its walls. Were I to write a book, this house would be a place of great symbolic pregnancy. I feel like I and this house are blood brothers, in a way. Jen, I know you know what I mean even though you wouldn't describe it quite like I am.
9. A stranger told me I looked like Winnie Cooper. I've still got it.
10. Finally, I'm grateful for this backpack I got for Christmas. I look at that backpack, and I see Escape. I see myself going somewhere...anywhere...and being able to live off only what I can fit in my backpack. I just need to secure a couple thousand more dollars as cushioning and then I'm out of Arizona, packing all my unessentials back into my parents' house and I'm out of here. Joe, Darren, keep talking up Europe at me.

Anyone who feels like coming with me is welcome to; I promise to be as chilled as freezer-burned taquitos (beef, not chicken).