Without poems and deep thoughts...

I find myself being unsure what to write about. I see people blogging about Halloween and candy, how their day went and their new hair color. Meanwhile I'm sitting over here on the fence with my notepad watching the game play out, wondering where to start with each entry. It's sort of the same problem I have with vlogging. There seems to be no point to it, like I'm not getting anywhere and no one really wants to watch me ramble about my mundane life anyway. But there are hundreds of subscribers on my YouTube channel and only 25 followers here who probably haven't stuck around since I created this thing however many years ago. So... here goes nothing. I'm gonna dive right in and blog about my life.

So I've been in college in Maryland for two and a half months now. It feels incredible typing that, almost unreal. It honestly feels like it's been so much longer, like I've been here for half my life or something. It just feels like home. Which is why my financial situation is so frustrating: I want to stay here, I need to be with the people I love, but I don't know if my bank account can handle it.

I love that I can talk about love so freely here. I can tell people I love them and mean it. I don't have to worry about it or think twice. I was very lucky for the harsh experiences I had leading up to college because it prepared me to be honest and brave and say what's on my mind. I don't know where I would be without those qualities.

So each semester we get 500 printer points. For both my English and Creative Nonfiction classes we have to print drafts of everyone's work and give them feedback, as well as printing out letters to the author. For english the minimum page number is 3, for Nonfiction it's 5. There's 15 people in one class, 17 in the other. I'm just gonna let you do the math on the amount of printer points that is. I'm at 230 right now and I'm about to have to steal some from someone else. Honestly, it's mostly frustrating because it's such a waste of friggin trees. Jeez.

My German teacher seems to think I'm some kind of language prodigy because I've taken three years of German and know more than most people in my class. Which isn't really saying much because I'm in the first level of German and if you've taken three years of it you should probably be more advanced.... just sayin'. She keeps cornering me and telling me that I need to go to Berlin this summer. and I'm like teach, my bank account don't bend that way. She seems to think otherwise. And lets me know often that my girlfriend is thinking about going. Which I know she's not because she's my girlfriend. Which is another improvement in my life. I'm not letting fear of relationships get to me. I'm far from home, and I've neatly shoved the past into a mason jar. It's not going to find me here.

I'm going to a wizard rock show this Wednesday in Springfield, Virginia with my friend Alex. This whole time I've been at college I've been yearning to attend a wizard rock show and take my mind off things. Even when I'm happy, extra weight gets lifted off my shoulders when I sit in a circle up front and listen to music about the Boy Who Lived. It's more than refreshing, it's more exciting than the most accurate metaphor, and I'm simply bouncing in my comfy blue library chair. I love the fact that I've been going to wizard rock shows since 2007 and each one feels as fresh and brand new as the one before. It just gets my bones so jumpy and happy and nothing else matters.

Last Friday, a girl named Mal Blum came to play in Baltimore. I found this adorable musician through my friend Liz who knew of my love of "Ampersand" by Amanda Palmer and sent me a link to Mal's cover of the song. I then found her other videos and became just a little bit infatuated with her. This was over a year ago. A month or so ago I shared her "Baltimore" music video with my college friends and they fell in love with her too. That's why we were all freaking out (okay, it was mainly just me freaking out) when we found out she was playing so close to us.

The collegetown shuttle ended up never coming and so we took Jimmy's taxi-van-thing down to the 2640 Space, where I hid from Mal's gorgeousness until after she and an amazingly talented Zoe Boekbinder sang their gorgeous melodies into the mic. I Hagrid-hugged Mal and explained the concept of Hagrid hugs, my friend Elisabeth's earthworm face, and told her of Liz's obsession with her, to which she replied, "I'm obsessed with her too!" and then wrote her a note. She was just so freaking nice and friendly and she gave me her contact info to book her at our school and eeeeee I freaked out forever because she's just such a sweetheart and I'm so glad I got to see her and got the lady balls to talk to her. It was such a nice intimate venue and I'd love to go back sometime soon.

Well, my hands are aching now and I need to go back to revising English papers. This talking about my life thing is kind of nice. Maybe I'll do it more often and eventually vlogging might even come naturally.

Metal smiles and Hagrid hugs,
Tianna

clean

fuchsia and lime.
wrap me up and take your time.
until morning, we walk the quad.
arm in arm, golden silence.
you won't ask me how i'm doing.
it's ingrained in your brain:
"okay."
our ghosts are with us everywhere we go.
we strangle them, fight with death.
we're not as weak as we thought.

Sleep is calling me

and I'm sitting awake, learning King of Anything on my ukulele that is far too out of tune. Just had a minor panic attack because I thought I left my laptop charger in the library and I am in no fit state to go and get it. But alas, it's in my bag. Okay. Anyway. It's hot. I've noticed that I get irrationally cold or hot depending on my mood. But most of the time I'm hot. If I'm not sweating, I'm about to. (Exhibit A that there's something wrong with Tianna.)

Classes have been stressing me out this past week. What jumps to mind first is my literary journalism assignment for Creative Nonfiction class. I usually enjoy going to this class but I'm honestly dreading going this Wednesday. This is going to sound horrible, but I'm really not that interested in most people. My topic is broad. My interviewees are nonexistent. My people skills are horrible. The fucks I give for this class are dwindling. I still haven't revised the piece I wrote to get published 3 weeks ago. I'm just kind of slacking and making up for it by making closer friendships. I need to find the healthy balance between the two again soon.

But now I need Katie's blanket that feels like a cloud, my Hogwarts blanket that feels like my cat Cheshire, and an empty mind. Okay, maybe thoughts of the cinnamon apple candle in my living room back home are welcome. It's gonna be okay, I'm registering for next semester, and I'm applying for more jobs. I'm gonna get better even if this one essay sucks Buckbeak balls. My excitement to let the bed swallow me whole is even more enticing than the anticipation to eat. Which, knowing me, is saying something, cause I really like food.

eating while alone

One of the saddest things I witness is people eating alone.

Young, old... okay, especially old... but really, anyone eating alone just tears my heart right out and allows me to bid adieu to my appetite. I feel so bad that I want to stroll right up and sit across from the person, but I won't because society tells me that's creepy.

I might ask about the wispy haired man in the corner's favorite grandchild and hear how she got top marks on her latest Economics exam. But this would be wishful thinking on his part: in actuality, he won't have spoken to his granddaughter in years because of a fault line in the family tree that had nothing to do with him.

Maybe Grandpa missed her so much he started fabricating stories about her, like I am right now about a man I've never met. But I'm sure I've seen him. He's one of the souls that eats alone, appearing genuine and kind yet with the potential to be a sociopath or some other form of deviant. For me, eating alone sets my nerves on fire and injects angry bubbles into my tummy. I get so worked up wondering what people think of me that I can't really enjoy my food. Oh my god, she's adorable. Look at her cute friends. I better stare at my food or else she'll think I'm a creeper. There's no way I can speak.

And even when I'm not by myself, I find myself tuning out of the conversation of my table-mates so I can observe what others are up to. What are they eating? Do they look happy? Why did they choose this school? Where are they going after they're done with dinner?

In a way I suppose these questions are exciting. It's wondrous knowing that I could actually ask these things and not be looked at as a total weirdo - or at least that's what I think. I tell some people I think this and they go, "You're such a writer!" but I think it just makes me a thinker. I think, I think, I think. Sometimes too much. Take, for instance, this blog. I started out my entry yesterday about kettle chips and ended up talking about the time I drove eight hours to meet someone off Myspace.

But that's what I love about blogs, college, and life. It's so spontaneous. Sometimes it's only that way if we make it so, but the ability is fleeting. When we catch it, maybe we won't all end up eating alone.

The toothpaste was disgusting

I just opened blogger.com with a few cloudy ideas of what I was going to write about, and then I clicked the link to my profile. What did I spy in my Interests section? Kettle chips.

I used to have a bit of an infatuation with kettle chips. It was partially because they tasted so fabulously salty, but mostly because my friend Ivy and I used to have a certain fascination with "Oh! Christmas Tree" by The Whomping Willows. Back in our fangirl days of 2008, we used to rap this song in public like it was our national anthem.

"Dumbledore just got here and he brought some appetizers
He's got kettle chips, some onion dip, and a plate of cocktail wieners"

Ivy and I would peruse the aisles of Giant Eagle on a safari hunt, sniffing out just these ingredients. Well, besides the plate of cocktail wieners because I'm a vegan and Ivy was vegetarian. We're too cool for that, obviously. There's even a picture of this exciting event somewhere on my Myspace... ah, and yes, I have found it.

To be honest, I forgot how much something as simple as kettle chips meant to me. I think they were more of a symbol of my friendship with Ivy than anything. Yeah, they're super tasty, but a girl with braces that got tightened once a month and sore three times as often isn't too prone to snacking on kettle chips when she's bored. So what's so great about them besides our partiality to that wizard rap?

Out of the blue one day in 2007, Ivy and I started talking about Harry Potter on Myspace. The first conversation we held in each other's Comments section was about how unrighteous Hot Topic was for not stocking Remus Lupin T-shirts. A year later I drove 7 hours and 42 minutes to her house in Middle of Nowhere, Virginia, where "Food Shitty"s are abundant, Ma and Pa's serves the best ice cream, and it's not a "pool", it's a "poe-ell."

Sometimes we'd mention the miracle of how I drove to southwest Virginia for the first time to meet a girl I'd befriended off Myspace. But what we'd truly focus on was how I jumped out of the white rental Nissan before my mom pulled it to a complete stop, how I jumped into Ivy's arms that smelled rich and floral, and how we peed in the Walmart bathroom with the creepy cold drains below our feet.

"Silly strawberry or mint?" my mom asked, pointing to the shelves of organic toothpaste without peeling her attention from Ivy's mom Debra. Who knows what they were talking about: what time their daughters usually go to bed? Where the nearest store with vegan options was?

"Strawberry," I shrugged, deciding to be spontaneous. I always chose mint. Maybe my time in Virginia would be punctuated with happy and delicious memories of Silly Strawberry toothpaste.

I think Ivy was the one who taught me that the little things like this matter. These memories do make an impact on my life. And they definitely, definitely prove that I changed while I was so close to her... even if the Silly Strawberry ended up disgusting.

"Is that Golden Girls?" Ivy's brother Isaac, who was my age, would interrogate from the computer room.

"Yep," I'd reply, a grin twisting my thin mouth. I was waiting for Ivy to get out of the shower, what else would I occupy my time with than old bickering women on a new flat screen?

Ivy and I fell out of touch for a little while, maybe six months or so. But she's one of those people that I've been confident since day one of our friendship. She'll always be hidden behind the cupboard door, maybe even under the stairs with the Dursley's spiders crawling around her Harry Potter DVDs. Wait, who am I kidding? She would never let those get anything with more than four legs near them.

Just looking at the words "kettle chips", a whole scrapbook seems to have knocked into my head like a meteor. Along with kettle chips comes this whole anthology of a rusty friendship. And now I'm hungry.

Of Wagner and Beacons

Three washers, sisters of the trade, hum against one another. A few feet down the hallway, I snuggle up to a turquoise washboard of a chair and carpet that reminds me of the brown shag from my childhood basement. Since then my basement has been remodeled, but something tells me this room won't change anytime soon. Maybe the flip flops, sneakers, and Converse strewn across the floor will make a few invisible steps. Maybe the swirling wall art will unstick from the cinder blocks. Maybe they will cascade to the ground and swallow the soft Febreze scent. Maybe they already have, for today it smells of pumpkin pie and cinnamon apple.

It is fall and my friends are raving. Spice has snuck its way into every imaginable nook and cranny. For the first hour it smells intoxicating, but soon it leaves a sick feeling in my stomach. I close my woozy eyes as Alison Sudol coos sweet words through my earbuds. I focus on breathing in and out, my raincoat crinkling against my ribcage. This room, where my head laid on her warm lap, where I extracted my soul onto the table, has no remnants of the beetle we caught in here weeks ago. It's clean despite the open boxes, tossed blankets, and forgotten, fuzzy pink socks under the bed. It's empty: the box of kitchen appliances I'm using as an elbow rest is irrelevant.

They say there's a first for everything, and that's no exception in here.

"How was school?" "Okay." "What did you learn?" "Nothing."

"How are you?" "Good." "What do you want for dinner?" "I don't care."

"You look tired." "Yep."

These pathetic excuses for conversation from my Monroeville life creep up on me sometimes, brushing against the thin hair on my arms just enough to tickle. I swat at them, telling myself that I've improved. I've gotten past small talk just like I told myself I would, or at least I'm getting at it. I never thought about cutting more than a slice or two of my soul out at a time. There wasn't anyone who had enough of an appetite for it, anyway.

Now, the I regurgitate the whole pie. All of me is out there, every piece, no matter how fragile or intricate. I've shrugged the snow and dandruff from last year from my shoulders, and it's bare. It's cold. It's fall, and you're ready.

I can be too. I sit and wait for the warm to embrace me, but it won't do any good. I need the cold, the whipping winter winds of Mother Nature. Maybe the beacons of a distant white mountain will dial me, leave me a flickering voicemail. Maybe this heartache is for good - maybe I only miss home for my eager to please mother and my furry, purry cats - but where's the fault in that?

As I rise to pass the washers, I will be pulled forth by their synchronization. My legs will do high kicks in my mind and I won't have to watch her hurt anymore. Everything will turn cold and dry soon, and I won't hide my arms inside my polyester.

liar, liar

both of us, caught in the act,

one of noble deceit, thinly veiled honesty -

where were you when my stomach

ate itself

from the inside out?

your gaze, so shallow, so shy,

your grin, so rare, so earned,

so secretive, lax, controlled, punish me.

a game of empty threats, a house of wax.

one blow from the hunt,

I spilled; and when you listened, crumbled.

“good job, I’m proud of you, you can do better.”

but could you ever know, how can you, you never will,

the speed with which my fingers,

the feelers of a bookworm,

ached to shake your knees, reach for the wheel,

wave in your face, I’m right here.

breathless, as you hit me through his eyes,

full force, to your gaze I bid adieu

a dozen times a day.

baby, bliss wasn’t cut out for liars.