Thunderstorm

He walks around like he carries 

a thunderstorm 

in his pocket. 

 Whenever clear skies are 

too much, he
disappears into 

his rain.

He holds his anger like
a gift.
For what else
could a lightning bolt
be?

Fear no fate

I have three tattoos, and depending on the weather, at least two are predominantly visible.

My first was a set of delicate quotation marks on my wrists, right over my pulse points. I was twenty. I lived in a world of fiction. Books -- writing them, reading -- got me through a lot of tough years. I wanted to keep that peace with me and be able to look at it every day and find it again.

Last May I got my latest tattoo. I was twenty-three, my sister was twenty-one. On the back of her left heel, she got the sun and I got the moon on my own right heel. I remember not being nervous, and I remember how brilliantly teal the walls of the tattoo parlor were with the early summer sun glaring through the windows. My sister means the world to me, and even more than books ever were or could be, she is my happy and bright, no matter how dark the nights.

But my favorite tattoo was my second. I was twenty-one, almost twenty-two. The days leading up to it were spent deciding where I wanted the tattoo placed, how big I wanted the lettering, which script was right. It was my sister's first tattoo (a quote from Rent across her back, in typewriter lettering). I wore my Ramones shirt. I had a panic attack on the drive there, making the tattoo all the more appropriate afterward.

Photo by Sarah Culver Photography

"fear no fate"

I decided I wanted the small quote to sit just under my left collarbone, a few inches above my heart. I wanted it visible; I wanted to see it every time I looked in the mirror.

Usually, the tops I wear cover at least part of the tattoo. (I noticed once, at work, that only the word "fear" was visible. It made me laugh, and then think about the importance of the two words that followed.) So, naturally, because it is a tattoo that is partially visible -- as in, visible enough to see I have a tattoo, but maybe not clear enough to make out what it is -- I get a lot of questions about it.

"Fear no fate." It's a line I cut out of my favorite E.E. Cummings poem, [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]. It sits at the top of the second stanza, and in full, the sentiment reads: 

  i fear / no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)

Settling

When I moved into my new place last week, I was coming down with a head cold. In fact, as I sit here writing this, I'm still fighting it off, surrounded by blankets, electrolytes, and tissues that claim to be "angel soft" yet leave my nose the brightest blazing red. It's fair to say these last few days have been difficult for me to navigate (adjusting to the newness of everything, trying to feel comfortable being sick in a place that doesn't quite feel like home yet, the anxiety of everything). But I'm doing it. Even when it is difficult, and when I'm at my low, I'm doing it. Take that, anxiety!

Slowly but surely, I'm settling in. I'm almost finished unpacking, just three boxes of books left to shelve and a million tiny things to organize. (This would have been done by now if I were able to go 10 minutes without needing to sit and blow my nose.) I can already tell I'm going to be really, really great friends with my four new roommates--all of whom, before I moved in, were strangers to me. And, as expected, I love living in downtown Annapolis.

I celebrated New Year's in my new place this year, and on reflecting of the craziness that was 2016, I entered 2017 with not quite a resolution, but more an intention: In all things, be passionate. It's my goal this year to do every thing that I do as well, and as thoroughly, as I can. I want to commit. I want to learn and grow and challenge myself unlike I had in years' past. I want to pay attention to and appreciate the small things. To start, I've tried to take notice of moments or details I find beautiful and interesting in where I'm living.

• I can hear church bells from every room.
• The sun coming through my window at 11:30AM is the softest and most serene lighting.
• Cars driving down the street in the rain sound like a restless tide, if you are just sleepy enough.
• Wrapping yourself up in 10 blankets is much more fun than adjusting the thermostat up a few degrees.

There's still a lot for me to get used to, living in this new place with new people. But I'm excited for the change it's bringing. And in other news: the semester starts tomorrow, so I'll be going back to school for the first time since getting my undergraduate degree. I can't wait (and also I'm very nervous).

   

Mid-Move

I have a love/hate relationship with moving. The beginning of it is always the worst: looking at everything I have to do; the mountain of things I need to sort through; the boxes I have to put together, fill, and then literally move. It's a mini-nightmare of mine. The upside of it all is that, by going through all of my things, I start to downsize. Each time I move (which has been a lot recently), I take boxes and bags of things to donate. I declutter, if only for a little bit. I clean house and get organized again. And really, there's nothing more I love than reorganizing all of my things.

The end result is always wonderful. It's the process I loathe. As a kid, I would want to move rooms every other month. Not because I suddenly didn't like my room, but because I could picture how I would arrange my furniture in the other room, and how I would organize it, and therefore have a beautifully organized space that would make everything in my life go so much smoother. As an adult, the mentality is similar, but the practicalities of actually moving homes instead of just rooms (e.g., forwarding mail, transferring services like rental insurance and cable, etc) are annoying. So I focus on the good and remember that each box I pack to take to my new home will be filled with only the things I really, really want. It's time to clean house, get organized, and donate what I don't need. What better way to start the New Year?

Where to next?

I've been sitting on this post for a few weeks now. It's the reasons I've been silent over here for a while. Okay, one of many reason. (The other reasons are I'm about to move -- yes, again -- and I have to find time to pack when I'm not dealing with the holiday rush of working in retail. So you see, I'm lucky to have survived Black Friday, and I am very sleepy almost always.)

Let's start here: Change is happening. Big, major changes in literally every aspect of my life. As previously mentioned, I'm moving. I'll be living with four roommates downtown, and I'm so excited to get to know them and explore the city more. And now the big one... In a little over a month, I'm leaving my full-time management position job in retail to go back to school for something that has been dancing in the back of my mind for six years.

I'm studying to become a paralegal.

This has been a long time coming. It's funny, the other day Facebook reminded me (with that little "On this day X years ago" feature) that when I started my freshman year of college, right out of the gate I was thinking about changing my major law studies so I could become a paralegal after graduation. When I was younger, my dad used to always say that if I didn't do something in law, he wasted a lot of time waging arguments with me. In fact, I remember playing lawyer as a kid -- I used my parents' old (dead) cell phone and would pace around in our basement, pretending to be debating the terms of this or that while in a bathrobe carrying a toy dog Beanie Baby. Because that's what I thought lawyers did: wear robes, carry dogs, and have fancy black cell phones they could click closed in annoyance when things didn't go their way.