9

I don't like to jinx things, but my good karma is coming back to me in the form of things being so good. I'm over it, now let it go. Also, officially transferred to the Willowbrook H&M, worked 11 hours today minus 1 hour for lunch, stood and processed the whole time, totally exhausted but excited!

As if this poem doesn't hit close to home every time I hear it, every time a new semester rolls around I really think about it:

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
- Sharon Olds

And I think about how many people feel like that towards their parents. And how many people don't.

Songs of the day, make my head reel for autumn to come and remind me of autumns past...

I will never move away from New Jersey because my soul fills with some kind of feeling I can't explain when I wake up on that late September morning and feel the first autumn breeze through my window.

Explosions in the Sky - First Breath After Coma. My favorite song of all time. It basically reminds me of every important, happy, or devestating thing thats ever happened to me. I've packed so many emotions and memories into this one song I can't even recount all of them. It reminds me of freshman year of college, it reminds me of Becka and Jess, of heartbreak, of new romances, hands to hold, the coldest nights ever made warm, and seeing it played live on one of the best nights ever. I want it to play at my wedding, my funeral, and in the back of my head forever.
The Postal Service - The District Sleeps Alone Tonight. For some reason, I always associate the Postal Service with the fall. And every time I listen to Give Up it makes me feel nostalgic like every autumn does. Ben Gibbard is easily one of my favorite songwriters of all time.
Saves the Day - Take Our Cars Now. Hands down I'm Sorry I'm Leaving will forever be one of my favorite albums of all time. I will never forget the first time I heard it, when I was 16, in the back of a car with the windows down, with Lacey, on the way to a Taking Back Sunday show. I could almost say, it was one of those life changing things.

Also, someone please get me this for my birthday:


"Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you." - Satchel Paige