So, lately, when I'm not doing crossword puzzles, getting yelled at by my parents for being a deadbeat, and having random sobbing freakouts in the middle of the night with Austin leaning his head on my knees and Apollo rubbing his forehead against mine, I've been clearing out the dark cobbywebby crevices of my room and going through all that's contained therein, perhaps hoping that doing so will have a similar clearing effect on my mind. I've been going through notebooks that haven't been opened in ten years, ripping out pages I want to save, and recycling the rest. Throughout high school I'd scribble random thoughts or ideas in the margins of biology notes, assuming that One Day some Future Me would go through them. I suppose I am that Future Me. It turns out I was even more prolific in high school than I thought I was, my junior high poetry is even worse than I had feared, and the notes I used to pass with my friend Nikki are as hilarious as ever.

Sita and I are now leaning towards San Francisco/Berkeley for our future hood. So if anyone has a, you know, like...well, anyway. More on this later.

Anyway, here's an old letter I found while cleaning. I was about eight or nine when I wrote it. The "Jehovah" thing is because my next-door neighbor Maggie was a Jehovah's Witness, and I think I was hedging my bets on the addressee's preferred name.

Dear God (Jehovah),
I really love you. You're my favorite person on earth. Okay, okay, I know I'm kissing up to you, but it's true. Let's get down to business. I'm going to make a list of things I want. I know it's alot, bu I want you to grant at least 4 this month, and 4 next month. Thanks!
1. Nintendo
2. Gameboy
3. Pen Pal letter
4. Michael like me.
5. Bike
6. Me thinner
7. Me beautiful
8. Me get new clothes
9. Me better in school (being good, I mean)
10. Our table win the pizza party.

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!

Love (Very Much)
Danielle Hubbard

When I was lying in bed this morning composing this post in my head, the mention of Maggie being a Jehovah's Witness reminded me of how she was never allowed to come to our birthday parties or go trick-or-treating with us or get a Christmas tree, and how one time when Kirsten and I were ten and she was seven, we had a Halloween party, and we would have invited her but she wasn't allowed to come. But she accidentally got locked out of her house and nobody was home, so we found her walking around the block and crying, not wanting to knock on our door so she could stay with us until her parents got home because she didn't want to disobey them and Jehovah. Finally we convinced her to come inside and she sat down on the stairs still crying and we gave her a slice of pizza on a paper plate in a wicker paper-plate holder.

And then I remembered that this Halloween party was the occasion of one of the most rotten things I ever did as a kid, and even now I cringe to think about it.

Okay, so I wrote out the whole story and it ended up more like a novella, so I put it on my long posts page. Go here to read my soul-purgings.

Right, so, it's a really long story, but I'm back in Oxnard now with tentative plans to return to Chicago in a month. I keep trying to wean myself but inevitably end up back at the teat of the bitch. So, like, if anybody out there has leads on a, you know, like, job or whatever {*scuffs foot*} give a sister a shoutout.

I've said before that I respond to personal trauma by obsessive grooming, and last night, having tweezed my eyebrows, having attacked my pores in front of a 10X magnifying mirror, having filed my nails, shaved, flossed, deep-conditioned and blow-dried my hair, exfoliated, and rubbed cream on my feet and covered them up with little booties, I found myself unexpectedly left with nothing more to do. I was crawling out of my skin and had no more way to satisfy my craving for mindless mild masochism.

So I took the dog outside and instructed him to sit on an open trash bag, and then I snipped away for three hours at the hair on his lower back and tail. Someone was gonna get a crewcut last night, either him or me, and a girl's gotta draw the line somewhere. I told myself that I was helping him out, since he's got a nasty skin condition whose details I will omit since I don't want you associating them with me forevermore. That's important if you want to achieve catharsis through obsessive grooming: you have to be able to convince yourself that you're doing some good, even while you're giving yourself Marlene Dietrich eyebrows or blotching up your face with overzealous scratching and scrubbing.

Austin was totally cooperative throughout his undignification. He's the best. I adore that smelly bastard. I gave him about 50 treats last night for being so agreeable and understanding (well, "understanding" might be pushing it). It's nice to have someone to talk to, even if - or maybe "especially if" - his only response is to just gaze up at you with pure, unconditional love and devotion.

That said, I never thought I'd find myself - 6 weeks after graduating from college, and three weeks before my 23rd birthday - living at home with my parents, spending a Tuesday night feeling sad, lonely, and shellshocked, and clipping hair off my dog's fleabitten backside.

I just have to believe it will get better.

The longer you go without writing anything, the more you have to write about. That much is clear. Isn't it? But also, the more you have to write about, the longer you go without writing. Wait - scratch that. Change to: the more that happens to you, the longer you go without writing, because the more earth-trembling changes that happen, the less you have to write about. Or the less you know where to begin. Or what to say. Or how to say it.

I graduated from college!! I finally graduated from college!! The morning of, I decided to iron my gown, and sat puzzling over the gadget in question as I tried to determine what material my robes were made of. I decided linen. The hottest setting. If nothing else, I reasoned, they'd get super-unwrinkled. Then as I was smoothing the iron over the material, it seemed to sort of catch, as if it were snagged or something. I retried the same area with renewed determination. Again it seemed to catch, so I ferociously pulled the iron up and with it came a large chunk of black material that was most assuredly not linen. One thing they certainly did not teach me at the University of Chicago was how to tell the difference between linen and plastic. So if I appeared to self-consciously be holding my hand over a particular spot near my upper abdomen during the ceremony, that was why.

But I don't really want to write about that. What do I want to write about? My mom, my dad, Kirsten, Bryson, Burcu, and Carlos all came to visit me for the days before and even a bit after the ceremony. It was overwhelming but for the most part completely lovely. My mom stayed to help me move out, and on the fifteenth the two of us, plus Apollo, made the journey to California. Since then I've been in Oxnard, feeling stagnant and useless, cleaning out bathroom cabinets, reading 19th century Russian lit, doing crossword puzzles, and generally frittering away the days in that strange manner of seemingly doing nothing, yet the sort of nothing that mysteriously causes a whole lot of time to vanish.

My sister gets back from Central America on Monday, and I'll pick her up at the airport and we'll go to San Diego together, where I'll attempt to start a life for the time being. I never thought I'd end up in San Diego immediately after college, but then there's a lot of things I'd never thought I'd do or not do that I most certainly have or haven't ended up doing, so I suppose my own supposed foresight is not the bastion of reliability I'd like to consider it to be.

Anyway. The past six weeks have been alternately overwhelming, thrilling, frustrating, terrifying, and amazing. Hopefully, I'll reliably chronicle some of the aftershocks of the Big Earthquakes that have happened, although my life seems to have changed so much in such a short time that I feel strange writing to the same old weblog. Maybe I'll tinker with it a bit (of course "tinker" in my vocabulary means change the text color from plum to mauve). I'll keep you posted (PUN INTENDED HA HA HA)

Meanwhile I'll make vague asides to a source of great confusion and happiness in my life, a person place or thing who may or may not be reading this, and whom I may or may not be just a little bit crazy about. I've heard you're supposed to write everything you write with one person in mind, so, person (place, or thing), I've got you in mind right now, and I'm writing this for you.