February 2012
1 post
January 2012
3 posts
Fifteen in New York
And this was my secret. I could walk two blocks, I could get on a train. I could hand the conductor $4.25 worth of babysitting money and I could go to the city. By myself.
Penn Station on a Sunday morning. The magazine store with popcorn always popping behind the glass. The escalator that rode up and up into the streets I’d only seen with the permission of my elementary school teachers or...
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the...”
– Søren Kierkegaard (source: misswallflower, via 221212)
December 2011
6 posts
It creeps in on you so slowly that you barely even notice it until one day, standing in a fluorescent lit bathroom, you peer closer at that reflection you’ve been playing with for years now, and at the edges of your mouth and eyes, on the once-smooth surface of your forehead, there it is: age.
~
How little I really believed myself capable of it. Yes, I would speak at 15, at 22, of that theoretical...
Standing Straight: Surviving Scoliosis as a Teen |... →
“I had ten hours left. I was fourteen years old and certain of this as if it were a known fact. The following morning, they would wheel me into the operating room, cut me open, and in the process, they would kill me.
And yet there was something beautiful about this moment. On the cot beside my bed, my mother’s breathing was quiet and regular. I walked slowly across the floor toward the...
November 2011
6 posts
Denver Airport, yet again.
Lalalalalalalalala.
I feel like I live here. I have no clue how many times I’ve been here this year but it’s probably a really absurd number.
Also I’m a little delirious.
From the Bus Window
The plains stretch out dark and silent across Longmont, across Niwot.
And in my mind, I can see them roll flat, descending slowly through Kansans, through southern Illinois until they hit the base of the Pennsylvania mountains.
Mountains to mountains. I’ve lived on either end of his vastness, driven through it half a dozen times at least, and came to fall in love.
To love a land is to...
Dear Tumblr,
I have been almost silent, it’s true.
I have also been almost unbearably happy. This isn’t to say that upsetting things haven’t happened; they have. But those upsetting things have been a temporary overlay on what has otherwise been just a perfectly beautiful existence.
I will write more soon, though. I promise.
Love Always,
Rachel Rebecca
“No, honey, it’s bad! We go to Whole Foods for cheaper stuff.”
– Lindsay, on life in New York
October 2011
6 posts
Once Upon a New York October Night
Wearing her little red riding hood coat, the girl finds herself in Brooklyn watching videos of a woman twirling from a suspension bridge, above the people with mouths agape, above the water, above the world.
The girl twirls about on a stool and then rides over the same bridge into a Muppet party in the East Village. It’s late and the costumes are already half fallen off or taken off long...
October
is the New Yorkiest of all months.
This should be fun.
ephemera, et cetera: Write it on the chalkboard... →
ephemeraetcetera:
I will not take responsibility for your emotions. It is not my fault that you are in a shitty mood, and it is not my sole purpose in this world to make you feel better.
I will not take responsibility for your emotions. It is not my fault that you are in a shitty mood, and it is not my sole purpose in this world to make you feel better.
I will not take responsibility for...
“Most loves are a mistake
like the mistake of Columbus
Who came to America and...”
– Yehuda Amichai - Changes, Mistakes, Love
September 2011
5 posts
Become vulnerable and become alive.
9/12
Not the day of, but the day after. Or the days after. Because though it seemed like it would, the world didn’t stop. There was a Wednesday.
So I stand on the edge of the Queens College lot looking west at the black smoke rising into the sky. And then on the streets, the traffic impossibly slow even for New York. Three hours to drive what might otherwise be 30 minutes.
Stopped on the exit...
81 days
I am about to leave the Denver area on a Wyoming/Utah adventure, thus breaking an 81 day stretch (yes, I counted) of being in the Denver area. This is, I realized, the longest time I have been here continuously since I moved here. In is, in fact, the longest I’ve been in one place continuously since January 2009 (yes, I counted that, too).
I am not good at staying in one place for long...
2 tags
August 2011
9 posts
Time Rhyme
After not having seen me since October, she asks, “What’s new?”
“Everything,” I say, and it is true.
Miami Beach night
In the humid windy drizzle, the sand hits you grain by grain with the force of a thousand tiny needles jabbing your skin at once.
There’s always some romance to this — standing nearly naked with the waves and the waves and the memory of his eyes looking at you with that ache, with desire.
It’s the end of March and already the planet smells to you of winter.
For me, there is nothing so depressing as routine.
To dream, perchance to sleep
Blah blah blah blah insomnia blah blah blah
most fully myself, most fully confused
How I would stand in front of the mirror, sixteen, black haired, dark eyed, put on my dark brown lipstick, a skirt with a slit all the way up the side in the hope of getting even just a little attention.
Scribble furiously on the edges of my spiral notebooks and dream of the hot older boys with their guitars and their flannel, their long hair and how maybe I would just reach out my hand and twirl...
The last two weeks of my life
have been almost non-stop.
It comes to that point where I am sitting on a chair in my new apartment and wondering how it is that I got here. There are new memories, there are photographs, there are small pieces of evidence — receipts and such.
But it all seems so frenetic and frantic and even foreign that I’m not quite sure the person who lived through all of that was me.
A month that begins in a new apartment is a good...
August, August, here we go….
July 2011
3 posts
I'm going to start posting 1 idea here a week.
:-)
ronen-v:
One video a week, one idea a week.
“Sometimes your imagination is more personal than your life.” -Rachel Adler.
Pet Peeve
Men (and it has never, in all my 32 years, been other than a man) on the street who, as I am passing by, tell me to smile.
June 2011
8 posts
The Moment
It’s okay if people don’t like you, if you can’t connect with them even if they seem to be just the kind of person you would be friends with. And it’s okay to lose friends, to lose loves, to get into fights, to have someone angry at you.
Keep walking. Take note of what your feet feel like as they rub against your socks, against your shoes. Eat your pizza mindfully,...
1 tag
Heartbreak
racheladler:
When you realize the romances you make up in your head
Are made up in your head.
ephemera, et cetera: Perhaps it always happens in... →
What she said. :-)
Yeah, New Orleans was completely amazing yet again. But our adventure as described below definitely made the trip.
ephemeraetcetera:
Perhaps it always happens in New Orleans, where two 32-year-old women take a wrong turn into a desolate sort of neighborhood that has not recovered from the ravages of Katrina. And they wander down the road well past the point at which they...
The 10 Coolest Foreign Words The English Language... →
Dig.
I really miss...
having lots of independent movie theaters around. I was told there was (once upon a time) one in Boulder, but it closed down before I got here. And there are a few in Denver but only a very few and they don’t always have the movies that I want.
May 2011
6 posts
SUMMERINESS
I am so excited.
Plans already made include:
— Lebowski at Film on the Rocks!!!
— NAWLINS with Melligans and Spikey, which should be incredible, seeing as these are two of my favorite people in the whole entire world.
Also, there will be hiking. There will be biking. There will be cherries. There will be many a Farmer’s Market day and likely some Boulder Outdoor Cinema fun....
Weekly Video #3: A Process Portrait of Michael Cirino, as he throws an elegant 6-course dinner party… on the L-Train
This is awesome.