i am beginning to learn to love myself enough to say what i am really thinking and to be outspoken when something bothers me, instead of bottling up my emotions and apologizing and accommodating and excusing everyone and letting myself get walked all over. i’m also coming to terms with the fact that not everyone will like me and i don’t have to like everyone either.  recognize their intrinsic worth and respect them as part of Creation? sure. seek them out and try to win them over? not so much.

today has been sushi and blended white mochas, a short dress and unapologetically pale legs, cheap sunglasses and unruly hair, blasting The Killers from the car stereo with all the windows down, bike rides and iced peach tea and the first pool dip of the year.

• passed everything in my piano jury today: WOOHOO!
• found my nalgene bottle: little woohoo!
• currently studying for what I just realized is the my last final exam of undergrad. whoa. all i have left to do is transfer community college credits to my university and pass another round of piano proficiency during the last week of April, then graduate!
• had a blast watching the muppet movie with my younger siblings (ages 16, 11, and 9) the other night. i can’t remember the last time we all sat down and watched a movie together.
• tomorrow: final exam, pick up sister at PSU, go to other sister’s baby shower, pack for vacation

6 days to piano jury

7 days to biology class final

8 days to spring break

12 days to first opera rehearsal

6 weeks to graduation

• last Tuesday I met a couple of girlfriends at Powell’s to take advantage of the store-wide 30%-off sale, then went to dinner at Papa Haydn’s with the best friend.  The guy sitting alone at the table next to us told me I had a wonderful giggle, and suggested the two of us write a blog together because we have a joy and a fascination for life and are good story-tellers.  This isn’t the first time this has happened: for some reason, when the two of us get together people get sucked in to our conversations and have something to add to it. It is surprisingly not intrusive or uncomfortable.
• I laugh inappropriately loudly in public places when I am with close friends.
• I drank three cups of chai tea this afternoon while watching at least 10 episodes of Parks and Recreation. Oops.
• it’s still weird not having hair and it startles me every time I look into a mirror. My head gets cold.
• last Thursday I went to Night Strike with my dad and the boy. I didn’t really know what to do, so I served cups of coffee and hot chocolate to the guests while they waited in line for food or clothing or hair cuts. I also talked with a man named Kevin who seemed really sweet and had some stories to tell, and I hope my dad and I run in to him again this week.  I’ll probably talk more about this after I go a few more times, because at this point I still feel overwhelmed and over-privileged and anxious that I should be doing more.
• started working with my dad in his shop. It’s really cold and I hope I don’t accidentally bring several hundred pounds of equipment down on my head or something. But it’s good. I borrowed my little brother’s flannel work shirt on Monday and it looked like I was wearing a tent.

for me and for some of the people around me.

so i shaved my head.

well, not really. it’s a buzz cut. my sister helped me with it last wednesday. the real reasons are sort of convoluted and many-faceted and still not completely straight in my own head, but i felt like i needed to. i cried in my mother’s bathroom, and the boy held my hand the entire time with an odd mixture of pride and tenderness in his eyes, and then gathered up all of the copper-gold ribbons falling on the floor into a wastebasket and kissed my earlobe. what’s left is soft and downy and sort of the same shade as mouse fur.

and to my intense surprise, i love it.

life isn’t any less out of control, but at least now i have one thing less to worry about when i am getting ready in the morning to go out in public.

my hard drive is failing, which means i have to back up all of my files and replace the hard drive. which means forking over several hundred dollars for an external drive and the new internal drive when my current one does bite the dust. ouch ouch ouch.

(via embracethevision)

but instead i am walking to the grocery store in the pouring rain at 8:15pm because i have a burning desire to try kimchi. PRIORITIES.

sorta felt like hyperventilating when i was writing it out, but now i feel very relaxed and light and relieved.  it hasn’t been a terrible job by any means (restaurant hostess/singer), and i am very grateful for the skills i’ve learned and the people i’ve met and befriended, but it is time to move on. i don’t have another job lined up yet, but i am incredibly privileged to have my family’s support and encouragement.

will i work in other restaurants? i hope so. but they will be locally-owned establishments with recipes made from scratch with local & organic ingredients and fabulous local wines, not big icky corporations that don’t give a hoot about their employees and don’t recycle.

making tea and forgetting about it until an hour later when it is over-steeped and cold, but chugging it down anyway out of guilt, even though the whole point was to have a comforting, hot-enough-to-steam-my-glasses cuppa.

• Underwhelmed and disappointed by Dimanche and Other Stories by Irene Nemirovsky. Then I noticed that Suite Francaise and Fire In The Blood, her fantastic novels I’ve heard so much about, are translated by someone else. I bought Dimanche because I’ve generally found that short stories are the best introduction to an author’s work (for me), but that’s not the case here. I should have known better about the differences between translators. Oh well.
• I got The Cat’s Table (Michael Ondaatje’s newest novel) for Christmas, but I feel like I have to save it for the summer, for congruency’s sake.
• My dad cracked one of his ribs a few weeks ago (wrestling with a friend… idiots), so he hasn’t been able to work and is finding more time to read the books my brother and I gave him for Christmas (Ishmael, My Ishmael, 1984, Brave New World, The People’s History of the United States). When I come home from work or am just hanging around the kitchen or living room, he reads excerpts or entire chapters out loud to me. It’s really awesome and kinda makes me feel like a little girl again.