Tag: blog

I think a butterfly just flew out of my mouth

I can’t stop thinking about the butterfly thing, where he really said I think a butterfly just flew out of my mouth. And it doesn’t make me feel how it did at all any more, but it is so easy to remember how it used to make me feel. Like I’m watching myself act it out in a little movie.

I remember how much I reread that text over and over and over and over and I could have survived off of just knowing that someone felt that way about anyone. I only need three hours of sleep and a daydream when I feel like that.

Where you keep starting to do something and just forget right in the middle of it because he said he got butterflies from thinking about you so you drop everything and lay on the floor to ground yourself before you go flying into the Milky Way. And every time you pass by a mirror you go !!!! She Knows Something I’m Afraid To Think and you give yourself that little smile and can’t even let your own eyes meet or you’ll lose your grip on gravity yet again.

How strange it is that we can even get to that point. Where all you feel is !!!! and the butterflies in your tummy fly up to your heart and out of your throat and out of your mouth right in the middle of the airport and everyone’s wondering how did a monarch butterfly land right here in Terminal 3? But you hardly even notice because of all the butterflies still trying to make your feet lift right off of the ground so you swallow a thousand times until you feel about 60% certain that everybody can’t tell you’re in Big L.

He sent it from the airport. We weren’t texting before and I didn’t know how to reply. I probably read it a hundred times before I even thought about how to answer and the funny thing is I can’t remember how I answered at all. Some memories are like that. I remember exactly how I felt and how I pictured him sending the message and how it made me feel for the longest time, but I don’t know what I said back. Probably something mediocre because how can you beat a lyricist at the word game and in general I never know what to say just that I feel too much of it.

The picture is from Jude Guench, from a short story called The Butterfly Eater. I feel it is much more appropriate to how I feel now and in a way I feel like our stories parallel each other’s.

invasion of privacy

How are we ever supposed to care about somebody when we’re so busy pretending not to care?

It’s cliche and overdone, but I want to go to the Louvre next year. I will either walk into the museum with my hand firmly planted into the palm of someone else’s hand, or I will walk in alone and happy. I want to explore Paris, in love. Maybe I’ll be with a beautiful tall man or maybe I will be with my beautiful tall self and either way I will be in love.

I think I set up these big brick walls so that nobody would ever make me feel vulnerable again and it’s just resulted in hours upon hours of boring small talk that makes me feel small when I am capable of big intelligent interesting conversations that leave me with more questions than when I started.

I want to commit an act of invasion of privacy. I don’t want to hear about how you secretly like long walks on the beach because everybody with a beating heart likes the sound of water, the colors cast on the sea while the sun sets, and seeing footprints in the sand. We live in California, goddamn it, of course you fucking love the beach.

I want to know if your parents are together or if they are divorced, and why. What did they teach you about life and love that you bring into your own? Did you get along with your siblings? What’s your full name and why did your parents choose that? Were there any other names they were considering and how might your life have been different if you were named Geoff instead of Jeff? I want to learn something from you that I didn’t know I wanted to know.

I want to let you pole vault across my big brick walls of safety and I want to tell you about hyperbolic discounting, and why I think we get anxiety from placing salience on the wrong things. I want to geek out over how much I know about my boy Ben (as in Benjamin Franklin himself), and admit that the second degree I got was for fun. I can tell you all about love and sex in the history of America, because I’ve read hundreds of love letters from dead American couples for my senior thesis.

Tell me about somewhere I’ve never been, about how it feels to be able to fix a broken watch and hear it tick again and know that you put something back together with your hands and how that’s when you decided you were going to be a good engineer.

Above all, argue with me. Tell me I’m not right, and prove me wrong. I’ve never felt challenged intellectually in a relationship and now it’s my top desire in a man. I’m tired of the first two weeks of knowing someone getting filled up with misspelt “your beautiful,” because they never specify exactly what part of me is beautiful and I’m left on a riveting cliffhanger that never gets answered after we have one boring date and never talk again but they always reply with heart-eye emojis to my selfies forevermore.

I don’t know how to ask for these things and I‘m afraid that I come across as someone that may be incapable of connecting on a deeper level.

I don’t know when it’s appropriate to politely say, “Obviously we both find each other attractive or we wouldn’t be on this date, so let’s skip to the chase and peel back the layers of heartbreak that made us so tough to get to know and let’s really get to know each other for the next two hours so that we can make an informed decision on whether there’s something here or not and decide if we should see each other again or not waste our time.”

Is that not recommended? It’s not in my copy of the Why Men Love Bitches book, and it’s not in the “What Guys Really Want To Hear” articles in Cosmopolitan. I know I’m supposed to only be available two-thirds of the time so that he finds me mysterious, and that I have to wait four hours before replying to his Snapchat, but how am I ever supposed to care about someone if I’m busy acting like I don’t care about them?

I live a fulfilling, exciting life. I have the job that I want, my own apartment, a nice little cat, and the best friends ever. I am comfortable with myself and I am proud of my accomplishments. I want to learn more, travel more, and I want to fall in great love with someone that I get to experience new things with. I’m not in a rush, but I am so over 50 First Dates with 50 Boring Guys.

I know it’ll come at the right time, and I guess the right time isn’t now, but lately I’ve been wishing it was. Being in love would probably make this pandemic suck less. For now, I’m just going to live vicariously through Zac Efron’s Down to Earth show and keep trying to perfect my homemade gnocchi recipe.

the best love letter

I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you everyday… I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close… I will love you until your face is fogged by distant memory. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else and I will love you if you never marry at all, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all. That is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.

Lemony Snicket


This is from Lemony Snicket’s “The Beatrice Letters.” If you can, I really urge you to read this out loud to yourself.

I wish I could write something that encapsulated exactly how I feel when I read this. It’s so atomic-bomb-earth-shatteringly beautiful that I am left breathless after reading it. It gives me hope that one day someone is going to think about me like this, about you like this, about everybody. Talk about a soulmate, imagine being the Beatrice to somebody’s Lemony Snicket.

I want to write about it, but I think it really speaks for itself. And truly, it goes on and on, and would probably continue until the end of time if it weren’t for the silly fact that it does have an ending.

Here is the full version.

compatibility + obsession = love?

Last night I sat and talked with a very old friend of mine for hours. We talked about love, and contemplated whether the kind of love that hopeless romantics like us look for is even real. Is the formula for love compatibility + infatuation? I think I have only ever felt one, or the other, and finding a combination of those seems impossible. But at the same time it’s everywhere; it’s in every book I’ve ever read, it’s what I see when I look at my parents’ relationship.

I once said that I was a closet hopeless romantic. My friend responded by saying: 

“Oh my god. You are the most out of the closet hopeless romantic. You are literally running in the streets screaming through a megaphone letting everybody know exactly who you are at all times.”

I am a goal-oriented person. I make goals and then I obsess completely about them until they are reached. I am like a tiny little ant lifting a crumb to bring to the queen. Goal. Goal. Goal. This is a very good way to be when it comes to my career.

One of my biggest goals is to fall in love, but you can’t will yourself into love or set aside some time to do so. I don’t think that the heart really takes your goals under consideration. Hearts are very inconsiderate things.

There will never be a right time, but I think that there is a right person. You just have to find that compatibility and then become infatuated with them (or vice versa), and exist in that state forever. Sounds easy, right?

With dating apps it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that you decide when you get to fall in love, but I just don’t know if that’s how it really works.

I still hope that I’ll meet someone at a party, and he’ll say he couldn’t stop staring at me from across the room. Or at a coffee shop, where he asks “is this seat taken?” and we begin a deep conversation. Or I’m in my favorite book store, and he will compliment my impeccable taste in literature and fall in love with me.

it’s weird that they say hopeless romantics when it’s just the opposite. I’m so full of hope for romance, and I’m so happy that it exists. I just want a taste of it for my own.

bête noire

Noun. a person or thing that one particularly dislikes

I have collected a lot of pictures of quotes and I think it’s cool to look back at them sometimes and see the place you were in. These are all from the last year, screenshotted and saved in my phone while I was going through things that I can’t even remember now.
If it’s not going to matter in five months, don’t give it 5 minutes. These are all from the little five minutes of some intense feeling that I can’t even recall today. This is my little collection of bête noires.


I like that we can look back and be like hey, u good in there buddy? It feels like reading letters from your past self and knowing you really are all the wiser now. I’m not a wise person yet but I am definitely better off now than I was a year ago, half a year ago, even a month ago. We keep learning and we keep growing and that’s super cool and really exciting! Who will I be in six months?? I don’t know but I’m ready to meet her.

unbalanced

My posture must be so bad because I’m in a perpetual state of picking myself back up and dusting myself off.

I am so reckless in every aspect of my life, I don’t know how to focus on anything because I’m focusing on everything. I worked so hard at my job that in the process I forgot to decorate my apartment for a year.

I’m skeptical of the validity of zodiac signs because technically I’m a Libra, the sign of the scales, and yet I’m so awfully unbalanced at everything I do.

I love so hard or not at all. I either feel amazing and happy or worried and anxious. I will not trust you for a long while and then I will trust you so completely. I fall head over heels in love in an instant and I will daydream about someone for hours, until halfway through the day I’m really, really over it.

One half of the day I’m thinking of the delicate angle of his jaw, analyzing why his left middle finger doesn’t straighten all the way (probably a gym injury? we’ve known eachother for a week and I know he loves the gym, and I know him with my heart), thinking about the different colors in his eyes. The next half I’m thinking about how annoying it is to feel anything and how disappointing it is to know that I will most likely be disappointed because I build people up too highly in my mind and it never ends well so I have just let it go.

I crash and I burn and I get embarrassed so often. My posture must be so bad because I’m in a perpetual state of picking myself back up and dusting myself off.

I can’t read books in chapters, I have to read them in their entirety in one sitting or I won’t retain anything.

I was asked what kind of music I listen to recently and I didn’t know how to explain that at this point in time I am solely focused on listening to female rock artists and that even though I don’t love every song on Hayley Williams’ new solo album just give me time and I will grow to love each one.

I will do my makeup and hair, put on a nice dress, color coordinate it with a purse, and not do my dishes except for my favorite mug for a week.

I love movies because they’re perfect for two hours and they stay perfect (the same goes for music and books).

I think if I really made a good effort I could ruin every single relationship I have with people in two hours tops. Sometimes I’m tempted to, just to see what would happen.

I’m destructive to myself but I am also so protective of my heart. I have learned to take potential love slowly because in my mind it has already gone so fast. Sometimes I get the two confused and I end up doubting whether a connection really exists and I decide it’s safer to let it go, stay alone.

I want to take sexy pictures, flirt devilishly and not care, but I have to feel safe first. How can you be risky and safe at the same time?

I’m so either/or and never both but I feel like I’m always trying to be.

on being spiteful

The thing about being spiteful is you really only end up hurting yourself. Put down the can of Spite.

I think one of the main reasons why I have achieved what I have achieved is not something to be proud of. I am a person who works better when I am trying to prove something. I am a person that works harder because I don’t ever want to be a victim of anything.

I am a spiteful person.

When somebody does something to you and you get hurt, I think you get to choose whether you use that moment to propel you forward or to set you back.

I, like most people, have been burned a lot. By friends, by boyfriends, by coworkers, and family. But I don’t know whether how I handle it is entirely healthy. I tend to internalize things and out of spite I decide that I need to work hard to prove that I didn’t deserve that treatment.

I have a family member that lives to bring people down. They don’t put any effort into their own wellbeing or personal growth but they love to bash everyone else and judge everyone else for their actions. They lie, cheat, steal, and use other people and never care at all about how it effects the people that love them.

You could get recognized for something cool at work or at school, and they’d say it only happened because you’re a suckup or you got lucky. They know how to push your buttons just right because it’s the only thing they’re good at, the only skill they’ve applied themselves to. And I could write a whole other essay about how shitty saying someone is only successful because they “got lucky” is.

My response to that kind of behavior has been to prove that I can and will be better than that. I worked twice as hard, literally at two jobs, while they did drugs and insulted the family members we lived with. I got accepted to every college I applied for while they got denied, and I felt good.

I know you aren’t supposed to compare yourself to other people, and that’s my biggest flaw. For all of my virtues, for every time that I don’t lie, cheat, or steal, I make myself feel empowered by comparing myself to the people I know that do.

I dated someone that struggled to get a career doing what he loved, and my response after he dumped me was to get my dream job. Instead of working through the pain of a breakup, I worked for an entire year to make sure that I was nowhere in the same league of success as him. I wish I would have taken the time to grieve, to be sad and angry, because those emotions came later. They all flooded back like fresh wounds after I got what I wanted, and I kept cyberstalking him to make sure that he was still a loser and that what I did was worth it.

I thought that if he ever saw me again or looked at my social media profiles, he would see how much better I was doing and it would hurt and annoy him. I want my family member to look at my life and see that their life doesn’t shine as brightly because they are a pitch black pit of negativity. For all the pain they cause my family and me, I want to send it back harder with my success.

I hate flakiness and when my friends don’t follow through with their plans, so I set weird timelines for not looking at their snapchat stories, not replying to their texts, and not making plans with them. I asked you to go with me to an event two weeks ahead of time and you cancelled the day of? See you in six months, and don’t expect a text back from me until after I went to that cool new place you’ve been wanting to go to.

If I wasn’t so spiteful maybe I could stop and slow down and enjoy the life I have built. Maybe I would have more friends and be less successful, and maybe that would be okay. Maybe I’d be happier?

I’ve been trying to work on finding other reasons to push myself. I have been trying to stop comparing myself to other people and make time to stop and appreciate what I already have.

Being a spiteful person is mentally taxing. Because I don’t say spiteful things, or lash out at people to hurt them, in fact I really don’t think anyone would call me a spiteful person at all. But I do it all internally, and at the end of the day the only person who gets harmed is me. It’s very passive aggressive.

This is hard to write, and harder to come to terms with. I hope someone else out there feels like this and has a strategy to battle it. How do you deal with comparing yourself to others, and how do you motivate yourself in a healthy way?

on pink coffin-shaped nails

I think, like horoscopes, that there is a little bit of all of this in every woman. What part of your personality do your nails highlight?

Getting your nails done gives you control, power, and a show of your individualism.

You pick the color, the shape, the length, the medium. You pick based on how you feel, what you want the world to know about you, what you want the cashier at the store to see when you hand them your payment.

What do your nails say about you?

Image courtesy of Mashable Infographics.

Let’s start at the beginning. What shape are you going for today?

Square and squoval nails are straightforward. I see them on a businesswoman with a family, someone who cares about herself but doesn’t want to sacrifice the functionality of her hands. A mom who wants to be able to play catch with her kids without breaking a nail, and types on a keyboard all day on the office without drawing too much attention to the clacking of the keys.

Round, oval, and almond nails are for old souls. A girl that wears a red lip as an accessory to any outfit. She’s refined, well-spoken, and always orders the same drink at the bar (with a straw of course). She has an animal that she’s very close to, and animals like her. She likes when things look nice, and comes off as organized and put together but her car is a mess.

Coffin nails are for women who talk with their hands. She gets excited easily, and has a few things that she is very passionate about. She likes to show off a little, can be called dramatic, but she makes the best secret keeper. This is the girl that breaks hearts but only a little bit on purpose.

Stiletto nails are for that bitch. She watches beauty tutorials on YouTube, or maybe she has her own content channel. She always smells good and gives everybody advice that she never takes herself. She’s always aware of the newest trends, but she only chooses to follow things that suit her. She definitely has a tattoo somewhere, and it probably has a cool meaning behind it.

Image courtesy of COSCELIA Nail Varnish.

Time to pick your color. There’s always a big book or key ring of plastic nails to flip through and this decision has heavy implications about who you are.

A solid red is sexy. It says everything you need it to. There’s a power behind every hand gesture, and a promise. Red reminds me of the lady from the movie Holes that painted her nails with snake venom.

A solid white is for a girl that is funny on Twitter, but pretty calm in real life. She takes a lot of pictures. White nails look good every day of the year, but they also need to be refreshed more often. It’s expensive to keep up but it’s worth the luxury.

Fun colors like teal, purple, color-changing show that you like to have fun. If you can get your nails done every two weeks you might as well try every color. You probably get the newest drink at Starbucks just to try it. Fearless.

Getting one sparkly nail evokes a little bit of fun, but it’s like a little secret. Catch me if you can. Getting a full set of sparkly nails is wild and I don’t trust you but I bet you own either two disco balls or two diamonds. The B.D.E. of a woman with a full set of sparkly nails is off the charts.

A girl that goes in with a design has anxiety. She took a screenshot of nails she spent an hour going through Pinterest choosing, but she didn’t trust the internet connection in the nail salon to pull up her picture so she screenshotted it and while waiting for her name to be called she had the picture pulled up and made sure the screen wouldn’t lock when she showed it to the nail tech.

Who are you this time? I think, like horoscopes, that there is a little bit of all of this in every woman. But what nails you choose say a lot about what part of your personality you want to highlight at that time.

This week I am medium-length, pink coffin-shaped gel acrylics. And it feels good.

sudden repulsion syndrome

Sudden Repulsion Syndrome is what happens when a small decision or behavior puts an abrupt end to a budding relationship.

I get fight or flight but for relationships.

Like I loveloveloveloved maybe one or two people in my life, and out of nowhere I’d wake up one day and be so disgusted by them. The day before I was writing them in my diary and daydreaming about their cologne, and then suddenly I would gag at the thought of one guy’s laugh, at another guy’s little moles.

I think my least favorite part about myself is how I can never decide on anything but I always know how I feel about someone because my brain sends some strong chemicals 3000% too quick. I don’t know I’m over a relationship until I’m physically repelled by the person I thought I was happy about.

Or I’m 3000% the other way, and the norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin are like little butterflies trying to make their way out of my throat while I profess some kind of undying love.

I’ll fight so hard or I’ll run so fast, and neither of us is ever ready for that.

everyone’s a good singer

If you’re singing it usually means you’re happy and when you do anything harmless happily it is good, so you are a good singer because singing makes you feel good.

In junior year of high school I made a Great Gatsby-themed music video for extra credit, and my best friend and I modified the lyrics of Royals by Lorde, Roxanne by The Police, and another unfortunate song to be from Daisy’s perspective. It was horrible and cringe-y, my singing was not great, and it still exists somewhere on YouTube.

My friend had to rap for a music video when he was pledging his fraternity in college, and it’s the worst thing ever. Frat guys smoking cigarettes while wearing Supreme, rapping about joining their frat. Yikes.

My other friend was recorded singing Invisible by Linkin Park while he was fixing a computer. He was embarrassed after a lady recorded him and she was laughing at him.

None of us are great singers but I think we’re all good because at the end of the day we’re all going to jam out to Fireflies even though we got made fun of and embarrassed for singing.

Even if you get laughed at publicly, you’re still probably going to sing in your car when the next Adele song comes out.

I don’t know too many other things that are like that. Even if you’re “bad” at it, you’re still going to sing because it feels too damn good.