can't always be fight or flight

today alie and i made our last trip to tim horton's. we drove home and noticed the mountains for the first time. oh, this funny island of ours. you are too good to us. i felt a little stab in my heart because i've been taking all of this for granted. i have been so focused on where i'm going that i haven't really considered what i'm leaving.

it's hard to articulate how i feel about being here. i love it with every single particle of my being, no matter how miserable i may sometimes seem (be?). i love that when i drive over the hill i can see the ocean and that all of the bunnies are growing up into independent little creatures. i love that two of my best buddies are never much more than a holler away. i love being able to turn on the light in the shower on my first try. i love being in school. i love the protection that being in school offers. my only concerns are due dates and how to make my allowance last the rest of the month. let's not kid ourselves, i am spoiled. but i liiiike it. i want more of it.

aha! who am i kidding? i am going to move back in with my parents and my mom will cook me dinner and fold my laundry when i forget it in the dryer. my dad will slip us $20 to buy frozen yogurts or movie tickets without us even asking. i will jump on my sisters beds in the morning and sneak attack my puppies with all of the kisses i have. there are those things too. this afternoon i told my mom that i hope to get into kelowna fairly early on tuesday so that i can get some suntanning in.

really, who cares? kelowna will be great because i want it to be great. but it's important that i remember and appreciate being here. i have learned a lot, experienced a lot (!!!), played a lot, stressed out a lot, and been continually amazed at how my life is going.

it is going very, very well.

i will miss you. i hope you all have spectacular summers of love. suntans and slurpees and hands to hold. yes please.

dang

"only an undergraduate education" is the most disheartening phrase i've ever heard.

stoptalk

my life, lately.
but i've only won twice.

a prep course in cool

i call bullshit.
my english class was cancelled and i have no one to play frisbee with.

all of a sudden i have found myself with a block of time that is not meticulously scheduled.
blog time, okay.


jenna says that she reads my blog because she's hoping for some jenna&taryn stories.

so then i was reading back and i realized that i didn't really talk that much about the taryn&jenna phenomenon of the summer. and i think that has something to do with the fact that our summer wasn't a big blowout crazy madness shabang. it was subtle and unexpected and amazing.

mmk, righthip. this is how it went. i'm done work, i phone jenna. jenna is done school, she phones me. any moment of spare time? phone call. not even a text message, my friends. this is the real deal. then we would come up with a plan of action that would involve rollerblading or eating food or jumping on the trampoline or sitting around laughing. sometimes we would venture out beyond the regular comfort zone and go to rundle park or to myrnam or ikea or we would wander whyte ave aimlessly. yes, that's the general idea.

we even made a notebook to chronicle our adventures. few people are as cool as we are, that much is true. i try not to miss the summer too much because then it makes winter and school twice as hard, but this summer was amazing. basically, the weather was shitty the whole time and we were in sherwood park, but it's the people that make the place, no? basically, jenna made my summer. "the summer where all we have to think about is the right now. the summer that no one could have tried to plan any better."

oh and ps one time jenna punched me in the jaw and still doesn't believe me about it. we may have been too drunk to function as normal human beings (or we may not have been, i can't quite remember) but i know when i get hit in the jaw. and also, jenna was the one who dared me to smoke a cigarette. first and almost only. bad influence. and also, jenna was the one with a permanent address so she got a library card that i bummed off of her at every available opportunity. oh and also i do not get enough jenna time.

jenna is coming here soon and i wish it wasn't reading week so you guys could meet her instead of, you know, having lives of your own. although it probably wouldn't be too fun for you because it would just be us going "oh man! that was the awesomest time ever and we are so cool and we are friends and we are going to talk about all these people you don't know and places you've never been and make you feel left out!!!! we are so excited and having the best time ever and must overload on friendship and coolness!!"

but i am getting ahead of myself. pete is coming. he is on a plane right now. holy shit, he is on a plane right now.

Esse

Esse

I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of Metro stations flew by; I
didn't notice them. What can be done, if our sight lacks absolute power to
devour objects ecstatically, in an instant, leaving nothing more than the void
of an ideal form, a sign like a hieroglyph simplified from the drawing of an
animal or bird. A slightly stub nose, a high brow with sleekly brushed-back
hair, the line of the chin - but why isn't the power of sight absolute? - and in
a whiteness tinged with pink two sculpted holes, containing a dark, lustrous
lava. To absorb that face but to have it simultaneously against the background
of all spring boughs, walls, waves, in its weeping, its laughter, moving it
back fifteen years, or ahead thirty. To have. It is not even a desire. Like a
butterfly, a fish, the stem of a plant, only more mysterious. And so it befell
me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat,
harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can
attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong
marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!

She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of
existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river,
suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

-Czeslaw Milosz, 1954