Longing for the Stars

One of my best friends just announced she's pregnant with a baby girl. Another friend is having a baby shower in three weeks. Several of my friends have kids who just started high school and my sister's oldest daughter just started middle school.

All my friends are married with families, houses, property with fences and garages and houses with washing machines and dryers and refrigerators that don't make screeching noises as you pray it keeps working so all your food doesn't go bad the day after you stocked up on groceries.

And me? I'm working at a job so far below my potential that even my boss can't figure out why I'm there, I'm months behind on my electric bill, my boyfriend lives more than two thousand miles away and I can't get my cat to stop eating my mail. Really. He seems to think the best way for me to pay my bills is after he's chewed off the corners and thrown them back up onto my shoes.

Today was an absolute disaster from start to finish at work and I felt like I let down so many people and I got yelled at by almost everyone one of my coworkers, even the new guy. And the one guy who actually makes me smile and keeps my brain from shrinking into an atrophied state of stupidity for lack of intelligent conversation, I felt like I ruined his day by constantly fucking up, so I faced down my fears of social anxiety and offered to buy him frozen yogurt after work for surviving the day with me. The visit was short-lived, I feel like I said all the wrong things and was this totally awkward bumbling idiot with her head in the clouds and if that weren't enough, as I pulled into the parking lot across from my condo, I picked up my half-finished cup of now-mostly-melted "froyo" and somehow managed to dump it all over myself. I mean all over myself. It's in my hair, it's all over my brand new shirt, all over my very last pair of clean pants, it's in my fucking underwear.

And as I sat there in my car, covered in an ice-cold sticky mess listening to a song about a girl who just wants to escape her small-town nothing life, I couldn't help but laugh. This is my life. This is the lot I've been cast. Some girls were born to grow up into beautiful women, get married, have beautiful families and live happy beautiful lives. I have a friend with that life. Other women were born to be adventurers who see the world, pack up and head to Burning Man without any road maps or plans or obligations, and even the very few single friends I have left still have the "adult" thing down enough to purchase their own homes and new cars.

I spent the first 15 minutes of every morning trying to find my pants and at least twice a week, I have no idea where I parked my car and have an anxiety attack thinking my car has been towed or stolen or abducted by aliens. Nope. I just have attention-deficit disorder and can manage to lose even a giant 2-ton block of metal on wheels.

My life is kind of a pathetic joke; my only real goals are to fall in love and change the world. Society long threw out the last of its residual hippie population and somehow I slipped through the cracks. I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. Ever. I still write love poems no one ever sees, I still make wishes on shooting stars, and I still come home from work every single day with a burning child-like excitement beating through my chest wondering if this might finally be the day I get a love letter in the mail or a random package I wasn't expecting full of some grand surprise that could forever alter the entire course of my life.

But every day it's still the same thing: bills, grocery store fliers, and for some reason, car insurance offers for the guy who moved out of this place 5 years ago. I think I get more mail for him than I do for myself and he only lived here for 6 months before I took over the lease. Life is funny.

But while I was having frozen yogurt with my friend, I got this momentary arcane glimpse into my past when I realized that he's 22 and when I was 22, exactly this week 12 years ago, I was living in a battered women's shelter in a slightly worse financial situation as I am now, and just as lost on what to do with my future. But the thing is, This time around, I can laugh about everything that's going wrong in life. I can laugh, because I have hope. I know this is only temporary. God Almighty knows my deepest fear is that I will never move above this current situation and I will spend the rest of my life scraping to get by, but there's too much evidence suggesting contrary futures to this current lot.

I know I'll never be rich. I hope someday I'll be loved enough to wear a ring and give my life to noble man worthy of my undying devotion and maybe, if I'm lucky, I could have a decent retirement nets egg set aside by the time I'm too old to work. But in between now and then, I'm pretty much always  going to be the girl who says awkward things when trying to be social, I will inevitably find 100 more ways to spill ice cream on myself and be forced to walk half a block back to my front door covered in dripping wet white goo from head to toe as my face burns in shame wishing I could explain to all the cars passing me by that it's only ice cream, and nothing in my house will be able to stay clean for more than 24 hours because if I don't knock over or spill something, my cat will surely be right behind me picking up the slack.

But you know, there are far worse lives I could live. I could be sad, I could be mean, I could be bitter and resentful, I could still be suffering from an eating disorder and hating myself for eating frozen yogurt or I could have been too afraid to ask someone to hang out with me and be my friend. And I almost was. At the end of my life, I'll be dead. This is the time that matters. I have sticky ice cream all over my hair. I'll never be beautiful or graceful, but if nothing else, I can always find a reason to smile.

Twice in a Lifetime: Stories about the Moon

As I opened this browser tab to make this very post, Frank Sinatra's "Fly Me to the Moon" started playing on my Internet radio station. It's like the universe can hear my thoughts. :) There's something eternally romantic about the moon that I may never understand but I'd be content to explore until my final breath.

As a small child, I remember my dad telling me a story about the "Bunny Moon", in which the moon was actually inhabited by a large colony of bunnies that spent an entire month making rice for their monthly festival. You knew it was time for them to eat all the rice when the moon was full because rice was white and if you turned the man in the moon's face sideways, it looked like a giant bunny. I have no idea where he got the story from but I distinctly remember the day I realized rabbits couldn't sustain life on the moon and I diligently worked hard to keep my father from ever having his heart crushed by finding out what I had learned. So every month until probably my early pre-teen years, I excitedly nodded and told him I could see the bunnies on the moon too and I secretly hoped if he ever found out there weren't ACTUALLY rabbits on the moon, he would still enjoy seeing its beauty. I think I was in my mid-twenties when I found out my dad always knew and had been trying to protect me from the same reality I tried to hide from him. Great minds think alike, right?

When I was 19 years old, I took an astronomy class in college and we got to use telescopes that were literally worth more than the cost of my entire education there. My teacher was mean, impossible to understand, and I'm pretty sure he hated me and graded me intentionally lower than everyone else... however, he couldn't stop me from looking into that telescope and watching the craters of the moon slide out of vision from the viewfinder, proving that we really were moving through the universe, even when it didn't feel like it from so many thousands of miles away.

It's easy to take the moon for granted when it's just a giant night light in the sky but to see it up-close, to see the craters, the mountains, the shadows on the surface, it was breathtaking. The only thing more beautiful I've ever seen in my life was looking at the rings of Saturn through an even bigger telescope. But that's a story for another time. Tonight, my love is the moon.

Everyone has been talking about this "once in a lifetime" super harvest blood moon lunar trifecta. As a professional photographer, shooting the moon has always been a daunting task, since I'm dyslexic can never seem to remember if night skies are fast shutter speeds and large apertures or small apertures and long shutters. And then you have to take into account the factors of earth's orbit and light pollution. Light is the worst. Ironically, also the most important and necessary. I almost decided not to go for it. I've seen blood moons, I've seen lunar eclipses, I've seen super moons, like I said, it's easy to take for granted. But then my mom texted me. She asked if if I would be willing to try to take some pictures for her because it was so beautiful down in San Diego. That was all it took.

I got in my car with my camera bag, 5 lenses, my tripod, and absolutely no idea where I was going. I got on the highway and just sorta drove east until I couldn't see any city lights. I wound up in another city (not sure which one but it was probably 15 miles east of where I live) way out in the county. There was a dead-end sign on a residential street that looked promising, but as I got to the actual cul-de-sac at the end, I realized this is exactly the type of place a girl traveling alone late at night on a dark street in an unfamiliar city gets brutally murdered by the psychotic serial killer fugitive escapee who just broke out of prison and decided to hide in the woods because a fucking super moon brought everyone out of their homes and he had to go into hiding.

Yeah.... pretty much the fastest u-turn I've ever made in my life. However, further up the road I was able to find a safe place to pull over and still get a perfect shot of the moon.

At first, all I could see was a sliver of orange in the blackness of night but it slowly lit up to a more full orange, then red, then, as the earth's shadow passed over, a but of white finally started to peek through into a beautiful ombre of reds and rusty orange. My only regret is that I let someone get under my skin and haven't been wearing my glasses as much lately because two guys I work with constantly tell me how unattractive I look with my glasses (which I happened to love until they made me feel ugly) and how I shouldn't wear them because I "look way better without them" and because got into a recent habit of not wearing them, I let two jerks make me second guess my meaningless exterior and it resulted in my pictures not come out as sharp as when I found my spare pair of glasses in my car.

By the time I put them on, the eclipse was nearly over and the colour had returned to a regular white so I missed out on a once in a lifetime photo opportunity. While I'm disappointed to know part of me is perpetually 13-years-old and easily shattered at the whim of mean boys, it's a good reminder that beauty comes in many forms and anyone who can't see it isn't worth ruining something as special as tonight was. I know there are far better photographers out there than me with even more expensive cameras and longer lenses but I also know that without an adventurer's heart, it's just another picture of the moon.

There's a thrill you get on an adventure; never knowing where exactly you'll end up or if it will all be for naught. While I was sad that I had no one to share the adventure with me on my drive, my heart was joyful to know that 2,200 miles away, my boyfriend was out in a field in northeast Texas looking at the same moon through his telescope. When I got back. I saw he had texted me a picture of the moon from his camera phone, which appeared as a tiny red spot on a black square. I excitedly shared one of my pictures with him, and he replied "you win." It wasn't my intention to compete, but he made me laugh pretty hard.

I have no idea why the moon is so symbolic of romance, why Harry Connick Jr makes me turn into a giant puddle of starry-eyed nonsense, or why I have such an insatiable desire to take off in my car at any given moment, but I'm grateful for tonight. The world is lacking far too much romance these days and while this is more often than not, the secret place I go to hide my ridiculous notions of love an romance, I'm glad all the mean boys in the footsteps behind me haven't had a chance to ruin my hopes of love. I've still got that. And the moon.

(All photos shot with Canon 5DMarkII)

Beginning of the end of the eclipse

I accidentally slowed my shutter speed and caught this incredible shot of the moon in orbit. :)

At the end of the eclipse (when I finally found my glasses)

I have no idea where I was, but I don't think I've ever seen so many stars in my entire life

Barefoot Island

"I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me."
-Simon and Garfunkle

Summer has reached an end and as if on cue, autumn has been instantly drenched in rain. I knew summer would eventually end, I just didn't expect it to slip away one night without even saying goodbye. I guess I never really knew what to expect beyond the unexpected to begin with, so I can't really be too upset by any sudden changes. I knew it would be about strength; about survival, trials, walking through fire and nearly insurmountable faith braided into thick ropes of life lessons.

On my way home tonight, as the dark sky poured rain down onto my windshield, Simon and Garfunkle's "I am a Rock" came on the radio and it made me think about a conversation I had with a coworker. *sigh* I promised myself I wouldn't get attached to anyone at this job because I didn't expect to be here very long. I still don't expect to be here much longer but it seems I have found a sudden trap in unlocking a friendship with one of the most intellectually stimulating people there.

I put up walls. People tore them down. I pulled back, people came closer. I reminded myself over and over "coworkers are coworkers, not friends" because I've been burned far too many times in the past to be foolish enough to let my guard down. I kept my thoughts to my poetry and my journals as best I could and fought to keep myself as much of an enigma as possible.
And dammit if it didn't all crumble at my feet one way or another.

Trust is a thing to be earned. I will probably always have trouble trusting people but some just have an ability to break down my walls with a single glance. Books were supposed to be my shield. Instead, they became the undercover catalyst for one of the most thought-provoking conversations I've had about literature in a month of Sundays.

I think what I find most intriguing about him, however, is how incredibly misunderstood he is by the rest of our team.

"I've built walls,
A fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
It's laughter and it's loving I disdain."

Labeled as "the constantly grumpy guy", I have to wonder exactly upon which standards my coworkers base their determinations. The difference between people who smile and people who don't is interdependent upon how much they think about the world around them. I've noticed as I've gotten to know him more, whenever I get lost in thought and am enjoying the random internal conversations in my head, someone inevitably disrupts my peace to shout "SMILE! You look so angry!" and sometimes I want to shout back "I AM Angry! I was thinking about how EASILY obtainable biosand water filters could be in East Africa if only we had enough money to buy and fly them over so others wouldn't die from contaminated drinking water and they might actually stand a chance at living to see 18! You should be angry too!"

But alas, thoughts are for the "boring" and those with too much time on their hands. Or so I'm told. But this guy... he thinks. And when he speaks, he enriches my world, makes me laugh, and validates my own reasons for not smiling. It's not even that I am opposed to a world of happiness it's just... I don't know. The world didn't turn out the way I expected it to as a wide-eyed child and sometimes it's nice to have someone understand when and why you need to occasionally regroup. But it's also really nice to have someone inside my walls every now and then. It's a healthy reminder that not everything in this world is destructive either.

I feel both completely ready and wholly unprepared to leave for my next adventure. It would be so much easier to cut ties if I cared about no one along the way of life. But then, how sad would be my existence? Everything in me says I should remain an island forever and stick to superlatives for safety.  But then someone has to come along and fuck things up. This is the story of my life: an ever-softening heart failing to harden itself to the lies of the world. Even still, it brings me joy to see someone take interest in my continued existence on this planet, proving that, at least for now, I'm not a total waste of hydrogen and carbon.