Exactly where we're from

I have a (not so) secret love for Dashboard Confessional. I don't know what it is, but somehow the lyrics and pleading melodies make me feel like an adolescent boy with a pining heart. I guess I dig the nearly impossible feeling I get listening to "Hands Down" or "So Long, So Long." Oh well. There we are. I won't ever call it a guilty pleasure, because, frankly, I don't feel guilty for saying that out loud. Just wanted to clear the air. Oh, I also watch soap operas (I like to call'em stories) and love Cheetos. Maybe people should throw everything they know about me out the proverbial window, or hell, throw it out a literal window.

Sigh. I promised myself I'd get back to writing, so for now, this place will once again be my dumping ground. I hate to say it will be a diary or journal, but until I figure out something decent to write about, it's gonna be the brain drain.

What's the update here? Job's good and emotionally exhausting much of the time, baking has slowed way down, I still listen to sad bastard music pretty much every day, and I actually read one of those Swedish Girl Who Did the Thing with the Thing books. Who knew financial journalism could be intriguing?

While my time in the South has been life-altering in the best ways (I feel content with being a Southern girl and I finally feel...cool.), the West tugs at my innermost self, the part of my heart or soul or guts or some unnamed something that grounds me. I'm beginning to lose my footing here and this time I feel like I'm choosing it. Last time the world turned upside down was because I felt loss and my grief overtook me, shoving me face first into the muck of myself. This time around, though, I feel ready to face whatever is around the corner. Perhaps it's just a stone's thrown from the Ssip, perhaps it's time to bathe in the Pacific again, but whatever it is, I'm wrapped up in its embrace already.

A fraction of the sum

Holy Moses! I've ignored you, blogosphere. I have a great reason, though. It's because I was busy changing the world and making y'all some cupcakes. Don't be mad. I'm not. In fact, I'm probably happier and more at peace than ever in my personal history.

I revisited my post from last February and was a little shocked at how twitterpated I was with the Ssip then. I know I was in transition mode still and my system was repariring itself with cookie- and friend-making. I totally forgot how at peace I was beginning to feel then with my decision to be back in this forgotten homeland.

It's the end of another calendar year and the end of another decade. In this decade, I graduated from college, wrote an important paper, was published in two very different forums, have had three life-changing jobs, deferred grad school, moved cross-country twice, lost bare skin, interviewed one of my rock idols, and drank a crap ton of coffee. I feel like I should make a full list or something, something that reflects all the goodness that was. Instead of the usual list of annotated thoughts, here's a list of cool stuff for which I am thankful:

1. Seconds & Decades
2. Miss Jackson (if you're nasty)
3. K$
4. The Job
5. Pedro Noguera
6. MS Safe Schools Coalition
7. Paste
8. The band that reminded me of pure JOY
9. Gifted opportunities by an urban family
10. TBD (two weeks left in 2009)

Anyway, live hard and be brave.

Letter from an occupant

Dear Monday,

I hate you and your stupid rainy face. However, you give me an excuse to listen to sad bastard music from my adolescence, so maybe I just dislike you a lot. A lot.

Also, Dolores O'Riordan, I miss you and all your Cranberries. Perhaps y'all can reunite and call up Frente for a private concert on my porch. I promise to make cupcakes.


Xoxo,
Neola

I'm the pretender and not what I'm supposed to be

Dear Everyone,

I miss this girl like a lost limb. Please advise.

xoxo,
me

The soundtrack of evolution

I forgot how refreshing it can be to revisit the tones that tickled your ears at some point before. When life gave me lemons, I scoffed at that lemonade thing and instead dug out old mix tapes, the tunes from lifetimes ago. It's so funny to remember what each person was telling me via musical conversation; there were glad hearts, heartbreaks, frustrations, ecstatic exclamations of true love, sincere wishes for a happy future, recollection of things and moments past. It has been like reliving five years' worth of hopes and dreams from other people, but being able to connect to each thought in my own time and space. Remember when I was SO emo?

Now I've gotten a new mix from a mostly new friend and the sounds are that of something awesome and promising. There are unfamiliar beats, lyrical dances and a funky vibe that is going to saturate me through and through. I plan on making this year get better and better. I wholly subscribe to the belief that we each make the future what we want it to be and I'm living that day by day.

The near future holds something really awesome: the new job is going great and I feel good every day going to work knowing that I am positively affecting the lives of several thousand kiddos in the metropolitan area; a non-work project that has been in my imagination for a few years is finally getting off the ground and in the process, I am learning a lot about sound recording and music production; my writing path is being decided for me as I go along and truthfully, I really dig it. Maybe one day I really will become the female Chuck Klosterman that I believe I can be. Until then, the future is bright and music is going to continue to rule that future.


I feel like a broken record, but thank God/Moses/Universe/Stinky Cheese Man for mix tapes for making me get my ass in gear.

There are maybe ten or twelve things I could teach you. . .

B posted this on her blog and I'd like to share it as well.

Ian McEwan, in this week's New Yorker:
"McEwan said that he never rushes from notebook to novel. 'You've got to feel that it's not just some conceit,' he said. 'It's got to be inside you. I'm very cautious about starting anything without letting time go, and feeling it's got to come out. I'm quite good at not writing. Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater.'"

We're half awake in a fake empire

listening: The National, "Fake Empire"

This has truly been a long absence from the blogosphere for me, but I've been doing a lot of thinking and doing and frankly, too much baking. The pursuit of just one of my dream jobs has kept me busier and much more exhausted than I'd anticipated, but it has been an unforgettable experience nonetheless.

The only reason I came here today to deposit my thoughts is that I've been listening to mix tapes lately, old and new, desperately remembering what I was trying to say, what someone else said to me and have been reflecting on friendships, failed relationships, new relationships. I've been in the Ssip now for several months and originally only planned to be here for a short term life, eight to nine months at most, before moving on to the next destination. And then I became nauseated from all the moving and realized I need some stasis.

This is a vastly different feeling than what I had a few months ago. Back in December, I could have sold off nearly everything just to go back to Portland. Granted, there are days I want to go back and those are the days I get stuck listening to mixes MJ made for me. Those are the days that all I want to do is dance with her and cook with her and holler at people on bicycles with her. Today suddenly became one of those days because every time I hear "Fake Empire," I think of her. In a minute, I'll move on to another song, but I'll still miss her.

All of that being said, I also had a really great couple of weeks that remind me of what I adore about being in Jackson and ease the heartache. I've had walks and talks and group television watching and Vagina Monologues and gym buddies and now, new mixes. The new mixes are hopeful and full of excitement, something that the mixes from 2008 didn't have. Those mixes were simply content and slightly shallow. These are made of motion, but this motion, while forward, keeps me in orbit here and now, just where I want to be.