One cop out after the next

It's so easy.
It's so easy to lose hope when you have been trying so hard to reach just one of your goals.
And keeping faith is so hard.
I've compromised so much lately just to ensure a better chance for myself.
Or maybe I've compromised because I'm scared of making a decision for myself instead of having it made for me.
If I had been offered a job somewhere, anywhere, I'd go there.
But I haven't, and so it's hard to go anywhere.
And so I've come home.
And it's not that I don't like it here.
But this is not where I want to be.
Of all my choices, I've chosen the one that is the safest and the least fulfilling.

This is not who I wanted to be.
I want to be brave, fearless, adventuresome.
No more of this playing it safe.

If I don't have a job by the summertime, I'm doing one or more of the following things (I'm telling you now because I have to write it down somewhere or it will never be real, it will never happen. It will be as though I never thought it, at all):
1. Making a huge road trip to the west
2. Moving to New York City
3. Moving to Chicago
4. Making plans to go back to school

So, in the mean time, my plan is to make as much money as possible. I'm stuck here until I save money, anyway. But while I'm here I need to make a point to do things that make me feel happy. Coming back home has a way of making me dull, smothering me. It's like I'm 15 again, looking for myself and completely unaware of my wants, likes, abilities, passions.
I don't want to just survive. I don't want to stay afloat. I don't want any of that barely living but still living bullshit. I want to live so hard that I could die tomorrow.

So, I'm welcoming change in to my life. And tomorrow I'm going looking for an adventure. My mother would ask me, "What is it that scares you the most? Find it and do it." I'll have to think on that one.

I hope I wake up before noon tomorrow.

Do we ever really become who we want(ed) to be?

Feeling in the weather patterns

It's been raining for three days
and the weather drips from my cheeks
in my own sort of downpour
you know Mother Nature and I
we're women
and we feel
and so we cry.

An old poem I wrote a few years back. I kind of like it.

The moon from my eyes.

It's glowing bright and full like it has been for a few nights now. I feel when the moon is full. I feel when it is half full. I feel when it is empty. I mean dark. I mean, gone.

Me and the moon, she said.

I'm sitting on my porch. It's 3:45 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, and I just got off work. It's warm, but the humidity left with last night's rainclouds, so there is only a pleasant breeze and crisp rays of sunshine through the full green leaves that cover Washington Street. Someone down the road is playing "Do You Love Me?" on the radio and the song is so appropriate for a lazy summer Sunday.

Last evening Spencer and I watched the end of Frost Nixon. The movie failed to stimulate my thinking, and I spent most of my time silently criticizing Frank Langella's acting. Good idea for a story, but I think the best Nixon/Watergate movie will always be All The President's Men.

When the movie ended we video chatted with Jersey, Rick and Nick Vandermolen and we all decided we'd go bowling. Nevermind that it was almost midnight. It was Nick's last night in town and none of us had done much of anything all day. So we went. Upon leaving the house, I stopped dead in my tracks to stare at the half moon. It was glowing like a night light in the darkest of all bedroom corners. Its rays were like a shower of spiritual renewal for my neglected body, its limbs flimsy and burdened by empty activity, its skin sticky with sweat from a day's work at a stingy breakfast joint. I stepped out into the glow of the moonlight and I could feel - physically feel - my soul lighting up, juicing up, charging again after days of running on low batteries. I stood there, my arms stretched out at my sides, and I sighed. Behind me, thunder clouds lingered, invisible in the darkness except when illuminated by lightening.

I wish more things made me feel so alive as a clear night sky. I feel small and huge, insignificant and diminished, giant and invicible all at the same time. I heard someone say once that through meditation, they achieved a state of consciousness that made them feel as though the world is in harmony, that we are all one living being, and the only thing that matters is this moment. That's what the night sky does to me. It brings me back to home base. It gives me stable ground to stand on and observe from. It clarifies everything for me. And the moon, with her milky rays, reaches down and soaks up all heaviness in me and absorbs it into her silk skin. She leaves me like a fresh pearl. She leaves me like a newborn baby.