Life Changes You. So Does Death.

My head is currently swimming with questions and sadness, and I don't want that to spill over this blog just yet. Instead, I am posting a story I wrote for a creative writing class that I just finished at UCLA. The assignment was to find a picture of a person we did not know and write a story about that image.
This is the photo I used:

The story I wrote is below, though the girl in my story is not the woman in the photo but someone finding her own two feet.

After Daddy died, Mama moved us three kids from Alabama to Minnesota so we could live with her Ma and Pa. We left our white house on Willow Tree Drive on a Friday morning and pulled in the driveway of Ma and Pa Regan’s on my 16th birthday, four days later.
Mama didn’t waste no time getting me and my sister in school. Sandra and I both started at Rawlings High, the same place where Mama went, just a day after getting to town. Little Tommy went to a grammar school across town.
I thought moving would be a good chance to change my name. All my life Mama and Sandra and everybody else called me Geraldine. I just hated it. So I thought I’d go by Gi-Gi instead. The name didn’t take at home, but the teachers didn’t know that.
There was a lot different about Minnesota. Sure we had winters in Alabama, but they were nothing like the miserable winters that come north. And the kids in the North ain’t at all like the kids in the South. They dressed a little better up there, and they all talked like they read dictionaries before bed every night. They hardly ever said please, and they weren’t polite about gossiping. In Mobile we’d at least wait until you were around the corner before starting in on the name-calling. My first few days at Rawlings, I caught hell because of the way I talked. Then the kids started in on me about my clothes. After that I stopped paying any mind, and I ate my lunch in the library.
It was like that for about four months, I guess, when one day a girl in my Biology class asked me if I wanted to sit with her at lunch. I thought, “My stars!” and tried not to grin like that Cheshire Cat. The girl’s name was Judith, and she had a strange way of talking too. I sorta frowned when she told me she was from Maine because that meant she was a Yankee, but I was so happy to have someone to talk to, I was willin’ to overlook that.
Judith and her friends smoked, colored their hair, and kissed boys in the janitor’s closet. Smoking wasn’t so bad once you got used to the sweet tobacco scratching at the back of your throat. And I’d always wanted to be blonde like Marilyn Monroe. Try as I may, though, I always felt like I was tagging along. Boys didn’t take a shine to me like they did to the other girls, and I only smoked at school. Mama woulda smacked the fire out of me if she caught me smoking in the house. So I wore more eyeliner than any other girl, and I kept quiet.
One afternoon, Judith talked a couple of us girls into cutting class. We went to Conrad Department Store to try on fancy hats and gloves. Usually bracelets and rings were behind a glass case, but that day there was a tray of sparkly stuff sitting out on the counter. I saw the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen—a ring with a pearl sitting right on top. I rubbed my thumb over the smooth pearl and watched how it disappeared under my palm.
I could hear Judith hoopin’ and hollerin’ over near the belts, so I went to join her. It was about that time that a man pressed his claw of a hand into my shoulder and boomed out, “Young lady, just what do you think you’re doing?”
Judith and the others stared at me wide-eyed and pale for a split-second before running off.
At the police station I had my fingers smashed in ink and my picture taken twice—one looking in the direction of a secretary typing away at a little desk and another looking right at the camera. The police didn’t really talk to me, just at me. A detective named Mr. Falls told Mama that I was probably doing it for attention—what with the move from Alabama and Daddy’s passing, but that weren’t true.
For once, I just wanted to keep a little something beautiful for myself.

New Work Digs

The company I work for, VEVO, recently moved into a new office. A new office that has a koi pond, a policy that allows pups to roam the grounds as they wish, and a bamboo forest. Well, it's sort of a forest.

Here's a glimpse of the kitchen. And some crazy chick named Elisabeth.

Photo Tour

I recently purchased a real camera. Pity I've been so busy lately with my writing class and various other activities--I haven't had any time to use the thing. I am hoping that my schedule opens up very soon so that I can take loads of pictures and learn more about life with a grown-up camera.

For now, a few photos:


Learning how to use the camera with a hot chocolate playing the prop.


Taken while on a walk in Santa Monica. I haven't even begun my introduction to the art of retouching photos. This one is straight outta the box.


At book club last night with Lulu, the puppy.

Songs for Crushing

Those who know me well know that I'm not much of a dater. However, I am a master at the art of nurturing a crush. I don't get them often but when I do, katy bar the doors. Not to fear--I'm not the sort who stalks and calls at all hours of the night. I tend to be the opposite, actually. After about a week of a crush, I usually want to be rid of it. It's a scary thing to be crushed by a person who hasn't a clue of your feelings (or sometimes even of your existence).

I've carried this current crush around since the Spring, and it has become suffocating. My mind wanders back to this particular person at the oddest of times (traffic, cleaning the kitchen, making copies at work), and my imagination seems to take off like an Olympic sprinter. I act shy when I'm normally quite outgoing, and my nervousness turns normal actions into bizarre actions. Case in point: I did a slight curtsy once when shaking this person's hand. Strange. It is as though I am not myself.

Recently I heard someone compare a crush to an idol. And with an idol, it is the worshiper who is seeking control over the relationship. Given that most idols are made of wood or metal, it is very easy for a worshiper to have the upper-hand in the relationship. As for my crush, I guess I look to create a controlled environment where every comment is insightful and full of wit, and every day resembles a photo shoot for a J Crew or Boden catalogue.

As I'm looking over this post, I am cringing with embarrassment. Who gets caught up in a crush after high school graduation? Well, it turns out quite a lot of people crush. I've noticed coworkers declaring someone a crush with enormous pride on Monday and then tearing that person down on Wednesday after they've been sighted smoking or wearing pleats. I've noticed movies where a crush leads to true love and sunsets. I've noticed that I am swallowed up by my insecurities. I've noticed that I'm jealous over the most trivial of things, and that is such a heartbreak to me. But it is not my crush who delivers the heartache; I'm the only one breaking things around here.

But, as one friend reminded me, crushes aren't all bad. Somehow they can inspire a bit of hope. I don't know why in the midst of feeling vulnerable, insecure and like a three-year old hoarding blocks on the playground, I am hopeful that someone will soon come along and walk beside me. I feel genuine excitement when I listen to a coworker outline details of her upcoming wedding. I am thrilled to the point of throwing air punches when I talk to a friend who has recently entered into a new relationship.

So that's where I am. Fighting off this crush as though it were the flu and feeling more like a middle-schooler than an adult. I prefer myself with no strings attached or distractions. And this poor man has me all tied up in strings.

Here's some music inspired by the art/war of crushing:

A song for when I want my way:

Please, Please, Please, Let Me...

A song for what I wish for one day:

You Picked Me - A Fine Frenzy

A song with a beautiful idea:

No One's Gonna Love You - Band...

Maybe someone is singing this song somewhere:

For Elisabeth Wherever You Are...

Photo Diary

For my birthday, my friend Meghan accompanied me to the Santa Ynez Valley (just outside Santa Barbara) for a day of exploring. Here's a photo taken at a lavender farm.


It was very hot that day at the lavender farm.


All that heat and lavender works up quite a thirst. Here is an amazing wine bar in Los Olivos, a town in the Santa Ynez Valley. Meghan and I enjoyed a flight of wine with a flight of mini-cupcakes. Pure genius, I tell ya.


The following weekend, I joined my friend Julie and her sister Lauri in Palm Springs for Labor Day weekend. Here's a photo from a night out. Mind you, our nights out revolved around delish food and usually ended early enough for us to make the most of the ac in our hotel room.


Apparently I need to master the art of Seven-Up Floats.

Sometimes God Takes Song Requests

It is a rare moment when I can recite a poem or lyric, so when it comes to church hymns I usually get the chorus but not much else. There are three hymns I can almost sing entirely without the aid of a hymnal: “Amazing Grace” (an obvious choice), “Be Thou My Vision”, and a hymn I learned at university, “From the Depths of Woe.”

That last one, though a bit dark, is a cherished one for me even though I've not heard it since my school days. I had often thought of jotting down a request to hear that hymn and slipping it in the offering plate on Sunday, but I never did. Rather, I opted to periodically remind God that I'd really like to hear that song.

I finally heard my request this past Sunday, the 13th of September, the one-year anniversary of the weekend my sister fought an arduous battle with crystal meth.

I don’t recall the exact date my mother frantically drove from place to place desperately seeking help for my very ill sister. I don’t recall how my dad told me my sister had been admitted to the hospital. By phone? In person?

Instead I remember the grief of finding a charred spoon and crusty needle in my sister’s eyeglass case, the drive up Highway 14 to collect two Rubbermaid containers holding my sister’s worldly possessions, and the smell of cheap laundry detergent that permeated the house where she had been staying.

There was nothing to say, so I tried to provide my mom with a reservoir of energy and assistance. At one point, late in the night of that hellish first day, I was asked to buy new clothes for my sister. You see, a body expelling poison is not kind to the wardrobe. In the darkest of night, I headed to a nearby Wal-Mart. There, standing under blinding fluorescent lights, I stared vacantly at rows of bedroom slippers dyed pale shades of pinks and blues. I reached for pink, my sister’s favorite color, and allowed myself to ask the question I did not want answered: “What if, this time, she doesn’t win the fight.” I must have been a sight, crying over fuzzy slippers in a Wal-Mart at two in the morning. Or maybe not. This is Wal-Mart I’m talking about after all.

A year later, in the high school theatre that houses my church on Sunday mornings, I allowed my mind to return to that hospital room. My sister was in the bed, sleeping. My mom was in the recliner next to her, distraught, lost, and desperate. There were far more questions than answers, and fear constantly hummed in the back of our minds. I could see all of these things clearly even though I was a year older and now on the other side of the country.

And then the pastor said a word of encouragement from 1 John while the piano softly announced that God had indeed granted my request.

A portion of "Psalm 130 (From the Depths of Woe)"

From the Depths of Woe I raise to thee
The voice of lamentation;
Lord, turn a gracious ear to me
And hear my supplication…

Though great our sins and sore our woes
His grace much more aboundeth;
His helping love no limit knows,
Our utmost need it soundeth.

Casualty of Photography

This made me laugh out loud.



(This image comes to you from The Sartorialist. If you haven't seen the site or the book, I highly encourage it.)