what I know

1. Friends are difficult to acquire, good friends are even more difficult, and I have both.
2. Being a girl is terrifying and wonderful.
3. It is hard to find what you love.
4. The right pen makes all the difference.
5. You will never feel worse after exercising.
6. Journal-keeping is the secret of the universe.
7. Sometimes people will be more talented than you at your talent. And sometimes you'll have to keep your cockiness in check when people are less talented than you at your talent.
8. Math never killed anybody.
9. Bubble tea seems like a dumb thing to purchase so often, but it really isn't.
10. Siblings should be your best friends.
11. All-girls schooling was probably one of the best things to ever happen to me.
12. Restaurants decorated with a blue color scheme are unappetizing. No food is blue.
13. Getting your bra properly fitted is actually extremely important and necessary.
14. Homeless people are so, so happy after Subway gift cards.
15. Your favorite albums will always be your favorite albums.
16. Nothing brings me more sadness and happiness at the same time than Harry Potter.
17. People can change.
18. People change.
19. It will make people feel good if you act interested when they tell you their dream.
20. If you get hot & sweaty enough, it just starts to feel good.
21. There are very few places in the world where I feel 100% safe, but it feels so good when I am in them.
22. Girls will be mean to other girls and boys will be mean to girls and all of them must be stopped.
23. It's okay to be embarrassed of who you used to be, but that shouldn't make you edit who you are now to appease yourself in the future.
24. Texas can feel like the kindest state in the nation, then the meanest.
25. Hating the rich doesn't solve anything.
26. Rich people aren't all terrible people.
27. Teenagerhood is a weird time.
28. Not all people are scary.
29. Life is wonderful even though it's scary.

truth bomb

This message is meant for a lot of people, but mostly the state of Texas. 

there is a parade

Trying my hand at some semblance of typography. This is a very nice day which calls for the loveliness of "These Things Are The Way You Make Me Feel", which I have found to be the universal cure for a case of the bummers (not saying today called for it, but last week did...) I cannot watch it and not come out feeling more smiley/more melty/better as a human.

Have a beautiful Mother's Day!

I was twelve years old in the backseat of my babysitter's silver XTerra in the summer, watching the tendons on her hand pulse as they draped over her steering wheel. I marveled at how they looked, casual and elegant and pretty. She drove prettily. In the backseat, I curved my hands to look like hers around an invisible wheel. I had tics- I would snap my neck back and blink hard and tap things once on each hand and then once with both. I didn't think I could ever be able to drive prettily with all those damn tics. I didn't know how I would be able to drive at the age of sixteen if I would be snapping my neck back every minute and rolling my eyes into the back of my skull so it hurt and squeezing my eyes shut. I would kill someone, I thought. I was scared of myself then. And it was a secret and I thought that I wouldn't tell the people at the DMV that I would snap my neck back and they would hand over a driver's license without suspicion and that made me feel guilty. I was twelve, worrying about a driver's license that I would or would not get at sixteen.

I don't know when the tics phased themselves out, but I didn't have them when I took my driving test and they didn't ask me questions about why I made my eyes hurt. But the tics crept back in a few weeks before my eighteenth birthday. Now I hate driving even more than I used to, because I don't text but I shut my eyes hard for two seconds and I shift my hands around to touch my turn signal.

I am twelve while being eighteen and I do not drive prettily.

dream a little dream of me

I've been keeping a dream journal for two or three months now. I've always been obsessed with dreams, and my sister will testify to wanting to smack me across the face because I would never stop telling her my dreams that she didn't care about. So then I started transferring those dream rants to my dream journal.

I had an idea a few weeks ago. I notice themes in my dreams, especially looking through the journal, and I wanted to make a sort of map, connecting the "plots" of dreams to their underlying and continuing theme in my dream spectrum. I didn't know if it would actually work, but it looked terrific in my mind's eye. I did it tonight, this dream map, and I'm damn happy with it.

The topics in ovals are the themes I notice continuing throughout, and the separate lines all represent separate dreams. Maybe this only makes sense to me, maybe it will be of interest to others. Either way, I'm sort of smitten with myself right now.

I dream a lot about men attacking me. I dream a lot about being vulnerable. One of these days I'm going to look all this up and see what it all means.