I'm in the mood

So I was researching this song that I have to record tomorrow, and I found an interesting version of it being sung in Japanese...by some leather-wearing eighties beauties. I had a little bit of fun watching it and trying to figure out what they were saying. I have a huge thing for that move where they put their hand on their pelvic-area and circle their hips.

Rarrr

This is the real birthday post that yesterday's was meant to be sort of satirically referring to. For those unfortunate friends who visited my blog yesterday hoping for a birthday post and saw only a narcissistic reference to myself and my useless blog...consider yourselves the object of a vaguely humorous joke.

Aika, I've written you a birthday post before, and don't want to get lost in that dark alley of love again. So here's a sweet little "hurrah" for you. Be satisfied with the knowledge that I did a little cyber "kaching" and a little dance across the keyboard on your 19th birthday. I miss you.
Nozo, you have been a wonderful partner in some of my most difficult ventures. I think you're the sort of person that can't help but eventually become everybody's best friend because of how wonderful and sweet you are. Let's get friendlier, you and I!! Happy happy happy birthday!

A less important birthday

I just realized that one of these days in August (the 16th, to be exact, now that I've gone and looked it up) marks my 4th anniversary of blogdom. I have had almost 5 minutes of indecision about whether I should mention it or treat it as water under the dam. Is it remarkable? Is it pathetic?
Who knows--I usually think it's more the latter. Being as I'm one of those filthy humans who usually cares about people's opinions, I find myself always a little shy of the "I read your blog"s or "Oh you, you're that Florence with the blog"s. Probably because most of the people that were privy to the blog context of my life usually made no detour to the opinion that they thought it was a pathetic waste of time. And it was, for a good portion of my teenager-hood, anyway.
Nowadays, I don't think it's something that I'm altogether ashamed of. I think about it pretty much every time I bother to update, and every time I come to the conclusion that there is still part of my heart that is thankful to have a blog, like there is a part of me that is well-represented here. Or just a part of me that is happy when I hit the publish button after having typed out something that felt right. There is something about being able to open up my brain-bag and line up all the little informations that have collected there and build a little lego house with them, a little something that is structured and neat, that makes me feel like I can throw those pieces away and move on, or that I've conquered and stepped up. It feels like stability, and at the same time it feels like continuity. Most of the time, it feels like something good.
And as much as I've never really intended any of my blog posts to be read as "compositions" or Reflections-style nuggets of inspiration, it's really sweet when people tell me that they enjoy reading, or that they feel the same way (an amazing feat that some people have managed to figure out how I propose to feel). Thank you! And here's to another little while of my own private blogdom. May Jesus bless it, amen.

Chaos

There's something about a messy room and a messy mind that can make you yearn for a clean room and squeaky thoughts. The serious mysteries of life all come to trouble you in one fantastic instant, tumbling in like ants on the warpath (I can just imagine Bear Grills: "Look! Fresh ant tracks!"). Serious mysteries like "Why am I typing a post for my blog when my room is a fresh disaster?" and "What will I wear for my show today?"
Other mysteries include, "Why am I so short?" "Why do I suck so bad at Math?" "Why is the sky blue?" "Why are YOU so short?" etc.
I recently acquired a few writing "assignments". Not the "punishment" kind--far worse--the creative kind, the endless self-bludgeon project. I sit down every other minute hoping that the fingers will become possessed to do a crazy dance over the keyboard and punch out something smart and small. The problem(s), though, is that my brain feels like a horse that is missing his little black eye-visor things. I can't seem to go straight for the love of God. You think it'd be as easy as putting one foot in front of the other, word-wise, but my brain keeps wanting to imagine that it has one hundred feet, and that I will not eventually be screwed if they all wanted to launch out in a different direction at once. I have become so (cranially) stretched through this vain writing exercise that I am afraid to take another step. (Maybe it's the messy room. Too many things all in front of my eyes to think about.)
I have only this ineptibility (probably not a word, since inept + ability is pretty much equivalent to -1+1, little bits of math for ya) to blame for the last haphazard posts that probably made everyone a little squirmy and afraid for me. So this is my roundabout, multi-tentacled-octopus-ish way of saying, "Don't worry about me! I'm just as fine as I've ever been, if not finer!!"
I can no longer remain in denial about the Hiroshima-Nagasaki tragedy that is my room, and I must now go clear some debris (pronounced *debree* for those who have been known to misread their "Power and Protection"s). See ya.

Stumbles

It's funny, how hard we try to be okay, strong, happy; just a few more broken ends to glue together, another broken personality to be dealt with, another broken day to face, more broken things to fix. Even when we're not dealing so well--when it's taking longer to wake up, to get on top of things, to be inspired for everyone--we still think we're dealing well enough, holding on and being strong like we're supposed to be. No one will ever get a single whimper out of you until it's gone beyond a little emotional softness into a hard sort of cynicism, and then everyone has a laugh at your little surprises.
And then there is the one person who is unlucky/lucky enough to stumble upon the foxhole that is your emotional fragility. The one who happens to stumble outside when you are behind the shed having your first cry in years, or the one who happened to have been there when someone was breaking your heart, and who happened to have been there again when everyone who came after that was giving you a hard time. Whoever they are, or whoever you are in relation to them, they lend you themselves and they hold you. When they're there and you didn't expect them to be, it's almost as though they put a period at the end of the sentence; they wrapped things up; they put a lid on the garbage can. They become the most important person in the world to you by sheer chance. They saw you cry, they saw the mess that you can be--they came out and looked for you. They said "I never knew..." and you know they never would have unless they had taken the one-in-a-million left turn or late night bathroom run.
And the funny thing is, while everyone believes they can be strong and hold up for everyone else, sometimes we need to break down to give someone else an opportunity to be strong. And if we were perfectly honest, while we may think we'd be happiest if we could hold up and fight the dignified fight to the very last, we're always the happiest when someone stumbles onto us and finds out that we're a lot less than they always thought we were.

Say

There's that moment when you're standing there and you wish everything would go real quiet, and the universe would realize that you had something to say. And you want someone to pull it out of you, and you wish you knew that a million ears were waiting to be reborn by the words that you're fishing for inside a clenched mind. But you know that the words that you want so badly to say (you've never wanted so badly to say anything before in your life) are the words that will mean the least to the people for whom you care the most. Things like "don't give up," and "I wish you'd stay," still sound like you're holding yourself back, or not trying hard enough, or not crying hard enough--whereas you know you have nothing more to withhold, and you've tried everything you could think of. You're just not so full of really good ideas for a time like this; you've never really been in this place of such wrenched emotional responsibility before, and have no idea what one is supposed to say. And when it comes down to it, you realize the most important words are the most simple. Here, all your life you were giving meaning to the wrong words, and now all the words you have that come close to expressing how you feel are the ones that sound chewed up, spit out, and trampled upon. Now you're devastated, because you wanted to be strong, and you wanted to be here so that you could say the things that only you could say...and you have so little to say.
There's never much to say in response to a barely-beating heart, a bitter regret, a slamming door. All within one moment you feel rejected, condemned, responsible, hopeless, cowardly, incapable...and you have two seconds to come to grips with it. You know you can't let yourself do the talking until you've learned your lesson, because you don't want to hear yourself repeating the same excuses, and you only have a second before they're out of ear-shot. So you panic. Do you talk a lot? Do you just freeze? You do something that you'll inevitably regret.
Usually it takes the train ride home before you really understand everything, and then you have a million things that you think you could've, should've said. But then it happens over again another time and you flip through those million things and realize none of those are sufficient either.
Or sometimes you love so hard that you don't let things come to a point because you know it would kill you. If you ever came to a place where you felt like you had to sum up how you felt in one moment, you know you would never be able to compete with a pounding heart, a racing mind, and a body that is gasping for air--so you avoid it with all that's in you. They'll never know that, if it came down to it, you would spill out as many words as you could think of, mostly words that didn't make sense, just to make them stay. And if you're someone that usually makes sense, this is trying as hard as you'll ever know how.
Or sometimes it's saying, "Go then." Because you hate yourself so bad for hurting her that you think she'll be better off.
Or sometimes it's going silent and saying absolutely nothing at all. Mostly because nothing seems sufficient, and you respect him too much to try to excuse yourself back into his heart.
Whatever the underlying reason, and whatever the hugely inexplicable emotion, you can't be dignified and sophisticated in love. You'll never know enough to love someone the way they want to be loved. There's never an easy way to say it, but people will always say "That's easy for you to say."No one will ever understand exactly how much love you have for them, or where it comes from, or why you manifest it the way you do. At the end of the day, when you've gone from here to there, held your head in your hands, and cried a little, you realize that all you could ever really say is,
"Don't give up."
"I wish you'd stay."

Reflections

I've been sitting here for several minutes trying to think of something sufficiently cool to go along with this picture. A good story perhaps--a nice testimony or a sweet accolade of love. I cannot think of much. I just think it's kind of weird that I am demurely staring into the camera while the boys are doing weird things behind me. It has a weird sort of ambiance that I like, because this is actually what it feels like most of the time going places with the Kando Bando. I am so stuck out like a sore thumb, I have the totally wrong image for everything (God knows if I even have an image) and the boys are always embarrassed by the clothes I wear and the way I talk on stage. Lord help us all. Go Kando Bando!

for you, i post