and you've got a smile that could light up this whole town

i am secretly obsessed with taylor swift.
school starts tomorrow, i need this new start. i will make good grades this year and not let my troubles get in the way. i'm even more excited for art class, but i wish i had the mac, that man is just something else. i ended my summer with a beer and a marlboro, not too bad. i'm somewhat proud of myself for not making this like last summer, getting loaded every other day. i've been sober over a month now and it feels like a weight lifted off of my shoulder. not drinking coffee to cover my breath not soaking myself in fabreeze not pouring half a bottle of eyedrops into my eyes. i do miss it sometimes, being a social butterfly being a flirt. i absolutely hate flirting. it makes me feel cheap.
and nobody i meet seems to compare to you, anyway. in the last two years i've only compared three guys to you, and i still would've picked you. when we talked on the phone until 5 that night and you said those things to me i got high from your words. remember when i told you that you look like john lennon when you wear your glasses and then you kissed me and said i would be your yoko and we'd lay in bed all day and just be? you're like a ghost- i want to talk to you see you touch you kiss you but you disappear into thin air. i need to move on, it's not healthy. you're so beautiful and smart and funny and you fucking introduced me to the beatles. nobody gets me like you do. but nobody has broken me like you have. and now that we're talking again and you said you still care for me has given me another reason to breathe. but i'm not a princess and this ain't a fairytale.

naked/then and now

i read something someone wrote today that made me feel a pain and a worry i never fucking knew i had. i cried hard, and the rest of this post was just screaming at me to write it. i'm the kind of person who says what i think not what i feel and hopefully having this wonderful little blog will help me grow out of that, i don't think i'm very good with words. also don't like sharing personal personal things, especially on the internet. i don't want your pity, i just need to write this because it wouldn't be sufficient to leave it in a folder deep inside my laptop.

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i lived in the typical American family. in those days, that meant a loving mother, a doting father, a few kids in a two story house with a dog, a cat, and an suv(in our case, a trailblazer). my parents worked a 9-5 while the kids were at school, and we'd have dinner together every night. my older brother would play with his Legos while i played with my Barbies as the baby was put to sleep. i listened to britney spears and nsync and watched rugrats and reading rainbow, and cigarettes and alchohol and drugs were something i would never ever do. i loyally said the pledge of alleigence every morning at school and played soccer on Saturday mornings, my little self stumbling after the ball while the whole family watched. Mommy and Daddy were perfect, and so was the world.

until the 21st century, when the definition of typical American family was redefined.
my parents are now divorced. because sometimes couples fall in love with other people and they fight and they do things they shouldn't and women who love women decide to hide it and bottle it up for twenty years so they won't disappioint their family. i watched my dad pack his things and the scar is still sore. my dad still works a 9-5, but comes home to an empty apartment every night. my mother glues her ass to her home office chair and her hand to her blackberry while her sons spend their day working on their dragsters and her daughter runs about town doing the things she told herself she would never ever do. i constantly question our rights and governemnt and what this country really does stand for. i wake up hungover on Saturday mornings stumbling to the shower or flipping shit on how i'm going to get home before my mom finds out i didn't really stay the night at A or M's house. i feel sorrow for my Daddy, and i can barely look my mother in the eye half the time because of that wretched woman she brought into my life. Mommy and Daddy are not perfect, and neither is the world.

the year 2009 changed my definition of family.

i have two years left of being a child, but i don't have the protection of my loving parents. my parents are already split up. my older brother is moving to stillwater next year. my mother got a job offer in austin and if she gets it then she's going and taking my little brother with her. i'll be here with my dad. at first it didn't bother me too much that they'd be moving. but after the thing i read today, i'm absolutely dreading the day my little brother leaves me. he's ten and is about to be a young man, and needs a big sister to show him how to get girls. today just the two of us spent the morning at the beach and he asks questions, alot of them. my heart melts when he asks me political questions, i'm sure you know why. as we were walking down the road to get ice cream i gave him the biggest hug, and when he asked what that was for, i said 'because you're my brother'. i was at the hospital when he was born, i helped teach him how to ride a bike, i called those punks that tried to take his money, and it never hit me how special all of that is until today. when he moves, how will he take to being an only child? will he cry because he misses us? will he even miss me?

ok i can't write anymore.

rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness, give me truth.

Get me out of this town. Not the cliche 'get me to a big city', that's even worse. Most people in this place don't realize that is possible to live without money, nice houses, businesses and credit reports, standards, expectations, and divorces. There can be a place where it doesn't matter who you voted for, where you buy your clothes, or what wine you drink.

At the art thing I went to in Talequah a few weeks ago, I was with a bunch of kids from towns I've never even heard of, and they'd never heard of the BOK Center. One of the girls asked me if I was popular at my school, and I said no, in fact I consider myslef an outcast. She said "How are you not popular at school? You're like, really popular here." My best friend there, we'll call her K, used to go to my school so we hit it off right away. We joined a small group of other outgoing vulgar stoners and before we knew it there was practically a waiting list to sit with us at meals. The other kids there wore clothes that weren't from a mall, not even Kohls, and yet nobody cared. At Owasso, God forbid you wear something that isn't from the right place! Even with this whole white vneck and vintage trend it still has to be the right fit, the right style. I walk down the halls and when I see someone the first thing I can think of about them is negative, except for friends of mine or people I just adore. 'You can see her fat rolls', 'Her hair's fried', 'I heard she's a lesbian'. I don't mean to do that but that's what I've been trained to do. Or maybe I'm just that fucking shallow. Kids in smaller towns aren't as critical, because they don't know that they know that life's too short and you need to appreciate the people who come into your life, because they're there for a reason. Now that I just realized this, I'm going to begin applying it to my life.

So anyway,

When I was at camp we did this this thing called survival day. We(the other interns and I) packed all of our stuff onto canoes and spent 30 hours across the lake, living on the land. We cleared a camping spot and made our meals over fires. It was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do in my life, but it changed me. The most trying day of my life, is life for more than half the people on this planet. When I came home, it almost sickened me that I lived where I do.
I'd love to do what Christopher McCandless did. After he graduated from college, he left his rich Georgia family, gave his life savings, and literally burnt his college money, and walked to Alaska. He lived off of the land and Thoreau quotes, and did odd jobs to pay his way out there. After a year or two of traveling he finally got to the Alaskan wilderness and lived in an abandoned bus, but only lived about half a year before he starved to death. He completely abandoned society. He left his car in the middle of the desert, burned his SS card, driver's license, lived off the grid.
I could never be be as fucking radical as he was, but I wouldn't mind being that lady he stayed with(played by the wonderful Catherine Keener). She and her husband lived in an RV and drove around the southwest, stopping at bohemian campgrounds and selling records, calling everything by its right name.