funions.

Take a good long hard look at that face. What does it say to you? Does it say, "I am calm and happy and sane and I have plenty of time to work a flattening iron?" If it says that to you, then you have to go back to Kindergarten and relearn the part with the posters where they talked about feelings. Because that is NOT what that face says.

Now, it MIGHT say to you, "Ew. I am seeing a naked person who I didn't really want to see naked." It's a misleading face. As much as it MIGHT look like that is what is happening with Sophie Johnson at this instant in time, unfortunately, it is not.

Look, I'll just tell you. That face says, "Really? You REALLY think I can teach second graders? Are you truly going to trust me with that?"

In the past two weeks, I've figured out the following: I am a trouble-maker. It's not my fault. I genuinely want to be a good, mature, professionally dressed, trustworthy teacher. My brain and my mouth BETRAY ME. Today I asked the sweet, wonderful curriculum director at our school -- who has been teaching for like thirty years and who is quite possibly my favorite educator I have ever met -- whether she wanted me to make her a cookie shaped like a penis. I WAS JUST EXCITED! She said I could participate in this amazing program which teaches teachers how to implement art into their lesson plans, and I freaked out because of how cool it sounded, and all I could think to offer as compensation was the penis cookie thing. This poor woman had no idea what to say. But you see how this was a potentially damaging choice? I'm going to lose my job by accident for sure.

And also: what am I supposed to do with all those blank walls in that classroom that I am supposedly supposed to be half in charge of? I, too, defaulted to asking Carrie (probably my second favorite educator, and co-teacher). But Carrie can't do it all. I should make a joke here about Carrie "carrying" the entire load. I would do that if I weren't so PANICKED right now about being IN CHARGE OF YOUNG LIVES.

We get the students on Monday. I called all their parents last night. You can't tell just by looking how much those two statements weigh, so let me tell you: They weigh A LOT.

I can't talk about teaching right now. I love LHA, legitimately. I would go to bat for this school. I really love what I'm doing. This is the kind of job that I might never walk away from because it makes so much sense to me.

And while I could go on and on about that, and bore you until you turned into a potato, I'll keep it brief and get the most urgent updates out there. Let's do a top ten. The top ten most important things that have taken place since we last spoke:

10. There are mice at our tiny, very clean house. I am always so torn about this. I know that you are supposed to be mad about mice. I mean, I get that. But they're so cute! I don't mind sharing my food with them. And while I understand that mice potentially cause diseases, they also potentially ask for cookies. And that's just adorable.

9. It's my mom's birthday on Sunday! This is the second year where I won't be there for my mom's birthday, and it feels very strange. Holidays and birthdays are just something that families always share. The most noticeable thing about living across the country is that I have to suddenly send birthday presents and Mother's Day presents, and I have to make phone calls, instead of just climbing in bed with her and kissing her a ton. My mom is one of my all time favorite people, so her birth should be super-celebrated. You can send her an e-mail if you want. Her e-mail address is LLucido49@aol.com. She's a great mom and a great teacher and she smells really good all the time and she just rode on one million roller coasters with my sister and my dad at Knott's Berry Farm because she (and I guess the rest of my fam) is a badass. Personally, I can't do roller coasters. They freak me the fuck out.

8. The first Crafternoons of the year was at our house. My goal was to make a shrinkable-plastic blue whale necklace like I saw at the art store in Portland. This proved to be reeeallly hard because the whale kept curling up in the oven, and it wouldn't lay flat again. Finally I settled for this imperfect version. I had to go with it because I ran out of Shrinky Dinks. I also made a similar one with a bicycle, and some Crest toothpaste earrings. We ordered pizza from Naked Pizza which has VEGAN CHEESE if you ask for it, and GLUTEN FREE CRUST if you ask for it, and you HAVE TO REMEMBER that this is NEW ORLEANS, so that's a pretty big fucking deal. I think I ate half of the vegan cheese pizza all by myself. Please don't think that's gross. It's only a little bit gross.

7. Speaking of making shit, living with Leah is the best thing that has ever happened to my diet. I mean, I've lived with vegans before, but never a vegan who likes to cook and bake the way Leah does. She's amazing. In the last three days I've eaten homemade vegan jambalaya, zucchini bread, and asparagus soup. I'm jealous of me too.

6. You HAVE to visit the NOMA. You HAVE to. Hannah took me to see the exhibit on the Art of Caring -- it's an exhibit of beautiful photography that has to do with: Family, Love, Caretaking, Health, Disaster, and Remembrance. It's incredible. It's like taking a journey. I don't know what's up with me and art lately, but it's been making me cry in a really good way. Art never used to quite do that for me, but now it does, and that freaking exhibit, man.... I cried like five or eight times. Openly. Children gawked.

5. Sam Alden is coming to visit! I know that's in the future... but it's a recent revelation! And an EXCITING one! We can go see the Art of Caring. Also, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this over the Internet, but he finished a really amazing art project he has been working on for seven months. How's that for ambiguous? I just want to let him tell you, that's all. This is like the gossip section of Sophie's Blog. It's basically Us Weekly up in here.

4. We furnished the house. This was such an expensive process, especially since Leah and I are both the kinds of people who are like, "Yes, that's good enough, let's buy that;" and not the, "Let's wait on that," or "Let's talk them down" kinds of people. We went to Target and bought a whole box of pots and pans for $100 that are light pink. Light pink. Also a waffle maker. But you know, it is this irrationality that makes us live together so well, and that makes our newly furnished house the belle of the Gayoso Street ball. ((Here is a short tour of our house. Notes on this: I say that this house is located at 917 Louisiana Ave. That's not true. I was confused. Also, the house is now furnished. Clearly, it was NOT furnished when this video was recorded. Now it is. So you can visit and you'll like it and think it is pretty inside.))***

3. My cat lost his collar. If you find it, please call. I'm pissed because I JUST BOUGHT IT FOR HIM and it had a BOW on it.

2. I got a new bike. It's a really cool 10-speed bike that you have to lean forward really far to ride on. You know that type of bike. A ROAD bike. It also has a men's frame, which I think is a ridiculous type of frame, because it forces you to kind of straddle the bike in a weird way when you want to get off, and I've had to buy bike shorts so that I don't flash my vadge every time I have to get off the bike. I named this bike Charley. Then I crashed this bike. It was a big, bad, nasty crash, and I whined about it a ton. I got reeeeally sick bruises and everyone at work was very concerned. I took Charley to get fixed (yes, this IS the bike equivalent of neutered), and I had the man give Charley a new seat, and that changed my life. Kind of utterly.

1. Radical Educators is a group that Hannah and Derrick started, and they probably wouldn't want me to blog about it because it has this kind of secretive air to it right now, but I am just so excited to be a part of it. We sit upstairs at the Fair Grinds on Sundays and discuss amazing new tactics to teaching, and support each other, and it sounds lame, but it's like THE BEST THING THAT HAS HAPPENED TO ME IN MY TEACHING CAREER, seriously.

So that's the top ten, folks. And I have been blogging for a hundred hours, and my alarm is about to tell me that it's time to read my book. And tomorrow it will be time to go back to work. And one day it will be time for me to buy a house. Inevitably I will someday get a dog. And a hug from a friend.

*** Blogspot would NOT upload this video in less than one hour. WTF. So you don't get to see the video. I'm sorry. It's only two minutes long, so I think that's pretty fucked up.

Complete with Photo Booth!

Moving is very difficult. It's physically difficult and emotionally difficult and difficult in every other way you can imagine. I think for me moving just strikes me in the middle of the forehead with how much FUCKING STUFF I have. Box. After box. After box. And I thought that once I left all my books in Portland and threw out half of it, and abandoned the furniture and MOST of the kitchen stuff, I would end up with just five neat boxes, a desk, a bed, and a piano. And a cat.

But noooo. BOXES. Check it out.

(In lieu of having both my digital cameras stuck in one of those boxes, I am resorting to visually impacting you with the high-resolution and top-notch quality of Photo Booth. Prepare yourself.)

As I get readier and readier to move out of the 1230 house, I... well... I get readier and readier. When the house was full of everything, it felt really FULL. A large part of me just wanted to stay so my heart could be in one place for the rest of time, and I could continue accumulating more shit, effectively pack-ratting myself into a nest of compliance. But now that I have spent a cumulative 24 hours cleaning, boxing, packing, throwing, tossing, wheeling, and otherwise dismissing the sticky total mess that has become the summative artifactual existence of the last twelve months, I feel deeply relieved. Like I'm ready to move forward; and there's no other real direction, after all.

I got on top of my shit this week. I finally got myself a personal care doctor in New Orleans. I made an appointment to get the recycling picked up. I DESTROYED my first cockroach nest (I know: They nest? But yes. They nest. And it is the grossest thing I have ever encountered in the whole of my little life). I got my bumper fixed. I called my landlord.

Like a grownup, I have committed myself to personal problem-solving. When my shoe broke irreparably on my 12-mile bike ride today, I sucked it up and biked home without shoes. And when my cat got fleas, I took him to the vet.

This was an extremely traumatic experience. It is possible Satchmo (who has been seriously freakishly nuzzly for the last two days [see photo at left], and chatty, and sometimes clutches my arm and looks me deep in the eyes as if to say, "Please, please never leave again." Often, this is all we long for in life, I suppose) has always had fleas. I may have just been too self-obsessed to really take notice. Fleas are QUICK! And when they have someone as warm and chompable as Satchmo to bite on, they don't necessarily make the transition to me, so it would make sense that I might not have noticed my cat's obvious discomfort. Satchmo was kind of a rockstar at the vet -- everyone was very impressed with his quirkiness and compliance, which did not surprise me. The nurse brought in all the other nurses to talk to him, because she was so impressed with him. He truly is superior.

But the flea treatment they gave him was very difficult for both of us. The vet warned me it would be, but I went forward with it anyway. This medicine she forced down his throat made all the fleas simultaneously have seizures and die twenty minutes after Satchmo took it, which made him GO CRAZY. He ran all around the house and flung dying fleas at everything still not in boxes. For most of the time he just sat next to me with pleading eyes and let me help him pick suicidal insects off his fur. Poor thing. Now he is napping in the shower. And my sheets, which presently contain approximately two thousand flea corpses, are in the laundry.

I've changed my hair in an effort to fully embrace the new school year and perhaps take on a brand new and more awesome persona. In the end, I don't like change, and I can tell because even when I am pretty happy and things in my life are unraveling marvellously (for example: now*), I still go out into the night and feel freaked out by the darkness when things are changing, and everything seems a lot more lonely than it really is. Last night I rode my bike for an hour deep into the park to listen to the sounds of summer night: cicadas and bullfrogs and something that I can only describe as "heat." James told me today that he had done the same thing last night in Crete. I guess summer nights are sort of the same everywhere; even if they are radically different. They sound good. They smell good. They have bugs in them.

Now I'm off to say goodbye to Kittee (Alex introduced me to her last year by way of a birthday present, and it was one of the best birthday presents I've ever received. She is a crazy, beautiful vegan who organizes the Totally Vegan Potlucks in New Orleans and is now moving, irony of ironies, to Portland). I have been writing these totally frivolous and self-involved entries lately in a desperate attempt to encapsulate this pretty momentous time into a nice little packet. Impossible. I am listening to Otis Redding! I feel pretty pumped up. Outside it is thunderstorms.





* Oh, by the way, did you know [and James told me this, in a very polite way] that you are not allowed to put "i.e." when you mean "in other words?" You are only allowed to put "i.e." when you mean "for an example." This is a mistake I make a lot. And so do other English majors. So I'm pointing it out now to save you all a lot of embarrassment)

88 percent fun!

Holla, PDX!

The Portland International Airport is simply more pleasant than any other airport. I have spent a lot of time at the Louis Armstrong Airport in the last year, and I used to say it was my favorite (1. It is named after Louis Armstrong. 2. It looks a lot like a post-apocalyptic wasteland and that is interesting to anyone who writes poetry in airports). But upon reevaluation, it's clear that Portland's airport is grandly superior in every possible way. I used to come here on the Red Line MAX train and sit in the little cushiony place where people wait to see the people they love come off planes. I stole this from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, it turns out, but at the time I didn't realize it and thought this was a very creative endeavor. In any case, I could spend entire afternoons here, creepily investigating hugs like a connoisseur. For that reason alone, PDX should be my favorite airport. And then it goes ahead and has a Powells right inside it, and that pushes Portland International over the edge.

Flying out of Portland today means that summer is officially over.

Although New Orleans will feel like summer for the next three or four months (with its humidity and swampy creatures taking over porches and backyard gardens). I start training for my new job on Thursday, and pretty soon kids in impossibly unhip school uniforms will overflow on streets and city buses. And so begins the year.

My last week in Portland can be marked by a series of re-discoveries.

Hannah and Leah (who both look good naked) and I went to the nude beach and looked (at least 2/3 of the way) good naked. We swam in the river, where the grimy sand has turned muddy and feels like wet felt on the ground (there's probably a grosser, more accurate way to describe that). Leah said, "Yep. This is what we are supposed to be doing."

We cooked vegetables, corn on the cob, raspberry cake and vegan mac and cheese, and had some pretty good-looking and interesting people over to eat food and discuss the merits and demerits of fungi in cooking.

This was really the launching point, and everything that followed either composed the largest group of mistakes I have ever made, or some of the best choices of my life. But let's be optimists here. After all, I was crushingly happy for four days. The only trouble was that then I had to leave, and I promised myself to never again get quite so attached to anything I had to leave.

But you know, non-attachment has never been in the cards for me. For the two weeks I spent lying in bed, reading books and sleeping for fourteen hours a day, I was categorically pretty depressed.

Honestly, I don't know why I am so addicted to commitment. I mean, I can love Portland and New Orleans equally if I want to, right? The way you're supposed to love children: exactly equal amounts of love for completely dissimilar qualities.

I kind of want to digress here and gossip about the people in my life. In my high school blogging days I would write mile-long LiveJournal entries about every single person I encountered in my life, as if every day was the Sophie Edition of Us Weekly (Vince Levy was wearing purple skinny jeans! Ian made an inappropriate joke over the phone! Trevor Hancy is scared of horror films!). But the truth is that relationships are beautiful as private quietnesses; and I have a paper diary, after all, to expound upon my thoughts on Ben Stevens' current wardrobe (hip). But, just in case you're out there wishing I would tell you about the fashionable and interesting people I surround myself with, I will write ONLY TEN WORDS on each of the ten people I have seen in the past week:

1. Jessica has grown up and fixes trails. She has dimples.
2. Ben Stevens is enjoying his life: Life's primary goal fulfilled.
3. Ben Malbin brings more people more joy than anyone. Underpants!
4. I wish I could sit inside Sam's mind for years.
5. Alexis is probably more mature than me. This is unacceptable.
6. My mom is still the best person to gossip with.
7. Leah makes me want to live my own life better.
8. Dad had lots of surgery and he still looks good.
9. It is impossible to be near Hannah and not smile.
10. Who knew Ethan was such a good farmer? Eugene did.

I'll mention here that I can't believe I got through this entire summer without getting my act together enough to see Andrew, or Nadim, or Ariana (who are all only four hours from me as I write). I think a pretty big part of me secretly can't quite go back to Whitman College yet. I need a little more distance before I can go back and not be a total nostalgia-obsessed basketcase. I know that basketcase is not a good look for me (trust me: I have experience in that department), so I stayed here. Maybe just for the vegan food.

For the coming year, I primarily want to learn how to build things. I went to Sam's house and I'm surprised that he was able to get me to leave (luckily, the Aldens have a forklift for exactly this purpose) because it was the best house I've seen in my whole entire life. The main reason for its perfection was all the cool stuff his mom built. I want to build cool stuff. I'm going to subscribe to construction magazines and hoard sun-bleached discarded wooden planks.

Also, I am going to fix my own bike.

I should warn you that I'm in the midst of consolidating all my blogs into one server, so someday you're going to have to change your RSS feeds in order to read all these fascinating and life-changing details about my existance in New Orleans. I am hoping that in the coming year I will suddenly be at 100% fun all the time, so I may have to start naming my blog entries after the names of songs just like they do on Degrassi: The Next Generation. Be warned. Change is on its way.

80 percent fun!

Let's work backwards.

I am just getting home. The house is full. My sister, who has the world's brightest blue eyes and the kind of blonde hair that people kidnap babies over, has about 20 (drunk) people in the family room. They are all sitting in a circle and it smells like beer.

Before this: I was at Pilar's house (I just met her. I'm pretending that I know her well enough now to put us on a first-name basis, but I don't. I didn't even have an entire conversation with her, except about how my once-aunt was named Pilar [she's not my aunt anymore... her name is still Pilar], and how Pilar [my aunt, not this woman I just met] used to sing erotic children's songs about the zoo). I was there with Katie Presley (remember her? Beautiful, creative, with a lovable affinity for things like "Degrassi: The Next Generation" and all members of NSYNC [is that band all caps?]). This is where Leah is staying. Everyone was dressed up like a French supermodel from 1963. Try to imagine anything more intimidating than that.

Well, HERE is what is more intimidating than that: not only were all these people unbelievably beautiful, with whispery voices and Size 5 shoes and bottle-platinum-white hair that would stop deer, but they also all played beautiful instruments. Classical guitars, mandolins, an accordian. They all sat about and played nonchalantly and sang with their oh-so-charming voices in French. This could not possibly last. I knew I was going to be found out (revealed to be, SHOCKINGLY, Someone Not Cool Enough At All) within minutes. Which is why I am home now.

This morning I was lying in bed catching up on this and that. I had epic phone conversations today with at least three people (for those following vicariously through me, James is swimming in a salty Greek ocean every single day. This is like my life dream, realized. Resentment and jealousy is bound to set in soon, stay tuned). I wrote letters. I started playing my iTunes library all the way through. I think it's time to delete all those songs that I have Just In Case. You know. "Just In Case I meet someone who will be, for whatever reason, looking through my computer and will want only to listen to ACDC. Just In Case I ever throw a party with a Seattle-1992 theme, and I need every Nirvana album ever all of a sudden."

Before that it was yesterday, and I got to split the day between Leah, my sister, Jessica, and Sam. If these people were not people, but were instead NetFlix movie rentals, I would intentionally "lose" them and pay NetFlix the $20 for each one so I could play them on repeat for the rest of my life.

Sam and I went to Laurelhurst Park, to which I had never gone. It is breathtaking. I say "breathtaking" here because it physically took away my breath on several counts, and that was a little tough for my lungs. But when they recovered, and then breathed in really deep, they joined with my nose in deciding that this Portland air is, for sure, the best air in the whole of the universe. I couldn't believe how good it smelled, in the rain. Likewise, the rain SOUNDED good, pounding on the leaves and slapping against the dirt. And you know how ducks LOVE that shit. And you know how I love ducks. There were bookoo ducks in the rain yesterday. And bookoo love.

Powells in the rain is the best, warmest place, and it feels like Portland, and in one thousand and one ways that feel Right with a capital R.

Before that we were driving through forests and past junque shops and Tie-Dye stands to get to the incomparable Oregon Coast. Above all, this is fun because my dog loves the beach more than I have ever seen any living organism ever more vehemently love any one thing. That just brings me joy to witness. Then there's that song by Le Ann Womack (I think) that goes, "I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean." I do, Le Ann. Very small.

She should know, too, that even without any kind of music or prompting or partner, at the beach, and anywhere else I should find myself emphatic and alone, I ALWAYS dance. I never sit it out. I am quite obviously good at following the advice of country song lyrics.

not very fun, but pretty relaxed.

Man. It is going to be preeetttty hard to pull myself out of this sleeping-all-day-reading-when-I-wake-up-falling-back-asleep-eating-unhealthy-food-exclusively rut I have fallen into. It's pretty comfortable, honestly. I could do this for a couple of weeks, at least. It's a pretty unattractive state to be in, I guess. I just lie here getting fat, finding out about the history of handwriting and getting lost in Haruki Murakami novels. It's the life.

Generally, I love the Fourth of July. Last year I was already knee-deep into Institute, getting absolutely no sleep and working my fucking ass off every single day. On the Fourth of July last year I went with Leah and Sean to Whole Foods and then we lay on a bit of grimy grass and watched so-so fireworks, but so enjoyed just being out of the penitentiary that was the ASU dormatory.

I like this stupid little shitty little country called America. It's full of my favorite people! (WARNING: PREACHY LIBERALIST ANGLE ALERT!!!!) But I do think that today is one of those days that we should take to remember that everything we love in this country was built on the backs of slaves, immigrants, and the oppressed. I hold that reality particularly heavy in my heart every July 4th. And then... celebrate how far we have come, and remember how much farther we have to go.

Today has been awesome, as far as Fourth of Julys go. I spent the morning reading in bed and letting the sky get nice and warm, listening to Dvorak (classy or elitist?). Then Alexis, Foofy, Mom and I went for a lazy long walk through the ravine by our house (Foofy wasn't lazy). My glasses are broken beyond repair, and watching the world pass by me as a blur has cast it in a new light. I can't see anything for sure, but I can imagine how things look, and sometimes -- often -- my imagination is way more interesting than reality. For example, I fashioned a mushroom growing on a log into a little naked pixie sprawled out in the sun. Awesome. Way more erotic.

Alexis and I turned on the sprinklers and ran through them. That used to be fun. I don't quite remember why. Then we ate popsicles and played Mario Kart for the Wii for like two hours. Then Quiddler in the sun and cut up a watermelon. Tonight: corn on the cob with butter and potato salad and an overpowering smell of meat. Every year my dad buys the world's most excessive box of boring-legal fireworks from Fred Meyers, and then he only lights like half of them, so we have this bordering-on-comically large bucket of fireworks just chilling out in our wine cellar dating back as far as I can remember. Generally, we all sit in the front yard and Dad sets off the little fireworks on a plank and shouts unnecessary warnings of "Stand Back! Danger!" And we all drink beer.

There's a threateningly sad air draping my family lately. I want to see my mom laugh that big chest laugh she has at least once tonight.

I just spent my last two weeks with James, maybe forever. In Portland this meant swimming in natural bodies of water, eating blueberries in Gabriel Park and playing frisbee (I know you thought you would never see the day when I would play frisbee, so just to return your mind's eye to normal, I concede that the me-plus-frisbee phase of my life lasted appoximately five minutes before I decided to sit it out), Mario Party, downtown Portland and every kitschy little hipster vegan brunch joint we could squeeze in, and a lot of time with the Johnson family. In Colorado it meant unbelievably beautiful mountain towns (see photo at right: there were about six people total who lived in this town, and it was comprised of a tiny, faded post office, a bakery that still left bread outside, a church built in the late 1800s, a babbling brook, and a cafe where the menu boasted ONLY quinoa burritos, butternut squash soup and cherry-rhubarb turnovers), vegan fried food that made me unbelievably happy and simultaneously sick as fuck, dinner parties, guitar on back patios with buzzing mosquitos, ice cream inside while watching the hot rain and spending the day at the Museum of Science and Nature in Denver. General summer activities. It was a very full two weeks, that's for sure.

About every two seconds I catch my breath and say (often enough out loud), "Jesus fucking Christ, what a year it has been." This is the first time anything has slowed down enough for me to reflect, and it's been almost too much to handle. Often I'll be lying in bed and I'll be struck in the middle of the forehead by the immensity of everything that has happened, and I'll suddenly find myself sobbing quietly, all by myself in my parent's old bedroom, like a little girl.

I keep clinging to this word, "Forward." Look forward, Sophie! But I guess for a week or so I can just be in this present, letting the past wash over my toes like the littlest waves at the beach. And I guess it's okay if it makes me cry sometimes, because no one has to know.

Unless I blog about it. Oops.

EDIT: Looking back at old entries about the Fourth of July, I must say that this year, the holiday truly did live up to my every expectation. Thanks, Dad.

Flux fun!

We are traveling.

This was my third "road trip," and this time it was from New Orleans to Castle Rock, Colorado. More than I ever, this trip has made me understand what I mean when I say that I want to go on a road trip.

It is not that the road trips I've taken haven't sufficed. In order to get here by today (which we did so we could help Aileen move, and more on that in a moment) we had to do the 21-hour trek in two days and one night. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, I remember when Grant and his brother drove from Northfield, Minnesota to Walla Walla, Washington without ever stopping to sleep. There were moments of delusion, of course. But it was, at its heart, a road trip, which became readily apparent when Grant called and said, "You have to drive through Wyoming at night. You just... have to." Those are road trip words.

On this trip James has been pretty knocked over by the landscapes. "Isn't the sky HUGE in Texas? I mean... it is just... BIGGER here. It just is. Isn't it?" And he watched out the front window as if he was watching someone perform a magic trick, trying to get behind its secret. And then in New Mexico, "Wow, it's really beautiful." "Wow, the sky." "Oh my god, look at the landscape here. It's so beautiful." And it would be beautiful -- rocks or fields or tumbleweeds pushed up against live plants pushed up against antelopes. The sky certainly did things that skies will only do on road trips -- it unfolded and changed colors and blew blackbirds around like they were bits of chewed up paper. This is the part of a road trip you can enjoy from the comfort of your car window, finding general images to hang up along the inside of your mind and attach to words like "New Mexico countryside," or "Louisiana bayou."

This works for me, and it is the only version of the road trip I have ever known. But there was this one point in which we stopped in this little town in Texas (whose name I can't remember, so don't ask), where everything was rusting or falling apart; where the paint was peeling from the old signs and barns; where the backs were torn off of saloons and shops, and construction projects lay abandoned or in wait; and THERE I remembered the real reason why road trips appeal to me.

In Walla Walla, my freshman year of college, Alan and Mac and Cat and Kuzo and I piled into this red Subaru and started driving east, with the only requirement of the trip being that we had to stop in every single town we passed on the highway. And although we traveled for three days, we BARELY made it into Idaho. Still, the trip was immortalized, and we talked about it the way other people talk about scandalous frat parties, recounting every little restaurant we ate fried food in, and every time we met someone who told us a story about the history of the place we were standing in.

I love poking around those little towns looking for clues about what used to be there, or what remains there. I love rust. I love the photographs you find left on those walls, or the footprints cemented into the sidewalks. I can't quite explain in mere English words how much I love small-town public libraries (it's practically a sickness). This, then, is what I want to someday get out of my All-American Road Trip. I want to spend the whole summer on the road, stopping a downright obnoxious amount to explore the back roads.

The idea is not remotely unique. I know that people fantasize about taking that kind of trip all the time. But too often I think we get too preoccupied with The Next Thing, trying to find the quickest way to get from Point A to Point B, without stopping, talking, waiting, breathing, or exploring. So someday that's what I want. And I don't care what the cost of gas is.

--

Colorado is very high up. It's funny, because I think I can actually feel the altitude change, which people say that you can, but I have generally not believed. I am a sucker for the placebo effect. If you tell me I should be feeling something, I assume that I am feeling it. Oh, so THIS is what love is! Oh, I am terribly cold on a hot day, so I SURELY have a fever! And so on and so forth. Last time I was in Colorado I was like, "I am POSITIVE that I feel this altitude thing. Oh man. It is making me feel GROSS." But then I walked away and decided that it was all in my head; that someone had told me I might feel the altitude, and so I'd assumed I had. But THIS time, I don't know, I just have a more prominent headache/ light-headedness that I am relatively certain I am not making up. James just told me that the first time I have a beer up here I am going to feel it. Which I completely believe because I always feel it when I have a beer. I have an exceptionally low alcohol tolerance.

Colorado is very high up and it is very much like Oregon in a lot of ways. For one thing, there are some non-deciduous trees, which, let me tell you, is a little mind-blowing after living in what is essentially a tropical rainforest. Also, there is a wider selection of health food at the supermarket, and a lot more liberal bumper stickers and hipster glasses here and there, and people know what "vegan" means, and there are definitely MOUNTAINS. It's weird to be in a place that is not Portland after having not been in Portland for a long time and feel like I am in Portland. I recognize that that does not make a lot of sense. You may have to experience it for yourself.

We helped Aileen move today, which I was awfully bitchy about. I am not all that good at practical tasks such as moving. James, who has worked concrete before, can withstand enormous amounts of discomfort without ever whining about it. Here are examples:

1. James played a game of basketball at the JCC (which I happened to also be at) and this guy started to give him shit. Then there was like a little bit of a fight or something, and the guy elbowed James in the face. Then James started bleeding all over the fucking place. Then we looked at his mouth and realized THAT HE HAD BITTEN ALL THE WAY THROUGH HIS BOTTOM LIP. And there was very little whining.
2. James went camping in the woods. He got a tick in his leg. I will note that I had also gotten a tick in my stomach, but James had pulled it out pretty readily, so I didn't have to suffer all that much. James' tick got stuck in there, and then he got Lyme disease. And there was very little whining.
3. James was teaching fourth grade, because that is his job. He took his students to the park to play with them, and his head got caught on the lip of the monkey bars (or something) and it got gashed open and he was bleeding all over his shirt and soaked an entire shirt in blood and he had to get nine staples put in his head. And there was very little whining.

Well. I am not like that. I whined like crazy. OOOh menstrual cramps. OOOOh heavy kitchen stuff. OOOOOOOh altitude. I am just not cut out for any kind of job that might be of any actual use to anyone in life.

And so we stay here until Tuesday, then off to Portland. Wow. Portland. My heart gets dizzy when I think about going to Portland, the way you feel when you know you're going to see your long-distance boyfriend who you're still totally in love with. Maybe you and I could visit when I get there?

90 percent fun.

So I got this e-mail today from Alex which said, "Why was the other day your funnest day ever?" And I realized that I had hastily posted a 100 percent fun blog post. I think part of me wanted to know if my blog would explode if it ever were to reach 100 percent. It didn't. Now we know! It was for science.

I mean, at the moment, I desperately felt 100 percent fun. But 100 percent fun is not achievable by merely a feeling. Here are few things that I might list as activities that could raise one from being a medium percentage of fun (say, 63 percent) to 100 percent fun in one fell swoop:

• If you rounded up all the giraffes plus a few other African Savannah animals (choose between hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and zebra), brought them all into your back yard, and taught them all the words to "Parents Are People" for a big African Animal Sing-Along, that would be 100% fun.
  
• If you rented out the biggest water park in the world and filled all the pools with different kinds of fizzy soda, then had a gigantic soda pool party, complete with a clown, that would be 100% fun.
• If you painted big smiley faces (approximately 25 feet in diameter each) all over the state penitentiary, then threw scented water balloons at the convicts on the yard to make them giggle, that would be 100% fun.

I didn't do any of those things, even a little bit. But I did have a bit of an end-of-the-movie climactic moment on Friday, and it felt AWESOME.

First, let me tell you that I have spent the last two weeks interviewing for jobs and sending off 30 or 40 resumes and cover letters. It's actually pretty demoralizing, as I'm sure huge unemployed chunks of America have come to realize in the last few months. I'd go through these big long interview processes, sometimes for jobs I didn't even want, only to hear principals tell me that they didn't have a job in my highly qualified area at the time. By Friday, I was weary. I had thrown a big dinner at my house for 2009 Corps Members and felt unqualified to tell them anything -- I mean, certainly they didn't want to end up like me, one of the last two '08 CMs without a school placement for next year. Cooking had ended up being stressful and not fun because I had to intersperse prepping the meal with working sessions at Tulane for Induction. I made portabello grillades, cheeze grits, herbed biscuits, French toast, Bloody Marys, and sweet tea, but I couldn't help but feel like my guests weren't fully satisfied with the meal... you know how these things go. It just wasn't perfect. And then finally on Friday, I kind of lost it a little bit, right in front of a TFA staff member. She said, "Aren't you EXCITED about your interview at Langston Hughes?" I was NOT excited. I was tired. I was done interviewing. I kind of just wanted a massage and an iced tea. So I got a little teary -- and in professional dress no less -- to the extent that I think I made that poor woman feel kind of bad. It's not her fault that I can't find myself a freaking job.

I worked all Friday. I was tired and hungry and hot and not on bike (as I prefer to be) for the entire day. Then I drove two other Corps Members (first years with the same placement as I have) to Langston Hughes for our interview. It was supposed to start at 4:30; it was so crowded and busy that I didn't get in there until 6.

But when I walked into the room and sat down for the interview, something about it felt different than the other interviews I had done. It felt like it fit. I felt safe and in control; the process felt conversational and real. When I got back to Tulane, two more awesome things happened: 1. TFA gave us Mexican food, which is exactly the kind of food I was craving in that moment; and 2. Hordes of people came up and started praising Avery.

I know I told you Avery made 5 years of growth in reading this year (WOOOOO!). Well, that's actually a pretty significantly significant gain for him. I spoke at Induction this year about his progress, and then the whole Corps watched a video of Avery reading with me -- a book on a 2nd grade level, with tough words like "birthday." He nailed the reading. Then he talked about how he'd graduated and how he was getting a job, and he was incredible. I guess he was more incredible than I had even realized, because I've never had more people approach me in my life than I had approach me on Friday night. I called him and said, "Hey guess what? You just changed the lives of more than 250 people." And Avery said, "That's nice. Can we go to Wal Mart?"

So I was feeling pretty good. I felt proud. The year, for all its disasters and missteps, had been a success, if just for Avery's reading progress. Also I was eating a burrito.

AND THEN Langston Hughes called me (not the poet; the charter school), and like a cheesy teen movie script, offered me a job teaching second grade.

So I was dancing on clouds, essentially, and came home feeling 100% fun. Also I had on a really hot dress so I felt both fun AND pretty.

I have been taking advantage of the calm, and have decided that there does not necessarily have to be a storm to follow it. We leave on Wednesday for Colorado. James is moving to Greece, which has not really cemented itself in my mind yet, but has been a reality since I met him, so maybe that has taken some of the edge off. Marianne is moving to San Francisco in a few weeks. Caitlin and Avery (non-student Avery) have less than a month left in the Big Easy, before they trek up the east coast in their own directions. And as I make my way back to New Orleans in late July, I'll be moving to a new house across town, with Ariana and Leah in Mid-City, with lots of bikes and looottts of cooking supplies. A lot of things are changing. My own personal history has taught me that change is uncomfortable but generally positive. I had a teacher in high school who told me that being liberal just means being able to embrace change. Well, I have listed myself as "Very Liberal" on Facebook; so bring it on.

Yesterday I woke up at 7 a.m. and cleaned the house, scrubbing the corners and meditating on the address which has been the first place I've really made my own home out of, from scratch, and without anyone else's help. I rode my bike to Octavia Books to buy my dad a Fathers' Day present, and passed a car wreck on the way. I stopped and kicked my bike to the side of the road. "What can I do to help?" Silence. It was a kind of a major wreck. "Have you called someone to help you? Would you like me to call?" Silence. Angry silence. As if I was intruding on something that did not belong to me. Finally, "No, it's fine. We're fine." And I said, "I promise it's going to be okay." But of course that probably meant nothing to them in that moment.

I bought fresh gingerbread and iced tea at the Laurel Street Bakery, where there was no air conditioning, and sat outside doing the crossword and rubbing ice on my legs. I lingered and watched people walking their dogs, trying to remember the names for the bright pink flowers.

Then I rode my bike to see Caitlin for what I think I know in my heart might be the last time. We had Cuban food at a CBD fancy restaurant, and I ordered a Mojito (the best one I've ever consumed). Then we bought beers and got tipsy-to-drunk on the Riverwalk. This guy passed by and pointed at Caitlin and shouted, "Girl, you so fine you make MEDICINE sick!" We didn't get it. Then he said, "That's real talk." Still didn't get it. But that's New Orleans.

Spent the next several hours drinking more and playing cards. And I rode my bike home across town in the dark without my glasses. I felt weirdly safe and protected in maybe a sort of false way. I felt lucky. I felt very, very alive.

So maybe these things do not make me 100% fun, but I'll settle at 90. I am enjoying my life, and exploring everything. I am saying "yes" a lot. I am looking forward, for a change.

See you in Oregon!

100 percent fun!

I would be surprised if I found out I wasn't the happiest person in the world right now.

61 percent fun.

Still no Snowball. Isn't there ANYONE out there who will go and get a Snowball with me? A lonely Snowball just doesn't sound that good.

81 percent fun!

Alexis is in town. It's a casual visit; she's here with her new boyfriend, who is named Sam (hereafter referred to as "SamJam"). He is a very "cool" person. The kind of cool that you write about in "Nylon" magazine (or maybe "Nylon: Guys" magazine)... he plays music and sings in a growly loud voice; he makes paintings on heavy white paper with ink and watercolors; he has very shiny hair. Yesterday we went to the swamp and it was 95 degrees. It was too hot to be walking. I get this overwhelming feeling of guilt when I suggest activities which do not thrill the entire group. But the sky was VERY blue, and we ultimately saw three alligators, which is not an all-time high, but is not the shabbiest possibility, either.

Anyway, having Alexis here adds a nice symmetry to the year. Because it was about a year ago that we piled six suitcases, eight large boxes, a record player, a typewriter, a tube of college-dorm-era wall posters, a doomed cooler of camping foods, an REI tent, two lacrosse sticks, and two sleeping bags into DARYL -- the stick-shift green Volvo wagon who would, at her fateful end, flip upside down over the hill in Nebraska on that very trip. After spending a solid week assembling data which told me that Avery grew 5 years in reading in one year, and that my five Life Skills students had more than 50 percent average growth in objective mastery for their class; and that Derren had over 90% IEP mastery in a year and can now finally move into the 11th grade with all the appropriate Carnegie units in place, I wish there was a bar graph or Microsoft Excel Document I could use to measure the amount that Alexis and I have grown in the past year.

She and SamJam will help me clean out my classroom today. The bulk of this work has been done, and a neat little box of binders and graphic organizers and flash cards and fake money is sitting in the trunk of my car waiting for whatever job I end up getting next year. But there are still trash bags to move out and shelves to push around and a big old floor to sweep... it's just not done yet. It may never get done.

My goal for today is to get a Snow Ball. I feel like I've been sitting around for ages waiting for an excuse to get a Snow Ball, and the truth is that the main excuse to get a Snow Ball is being alive and having a functional tongue. Plus, there's a lot to celebrate. Today we're going to get one of those, and then we're going to go to City Park and eat on the lawn and explore the NOMA. SamJam is all about the art museum. Thank goodness, because he HATES Mario Party -- a huge blight on his otherwise clean record.

On Friday I went to a party with James where there were a lot of second year Corps Members. They all looked entirely excited, exhausted, and terrified. I think it was a goodbye party. James said that he said lots of casual goodbyes there, but to try to really know what "goodbye" meant in that moment was much too overwhelming. I think that was what it was like to leave Whitman. Life has so far been a series of events culminating in endings which feel like standing on the edge of a cliff, and the whole world lies there, ready. I guess Teach for America is just another one.

Lately I have been verrrrrryyyy reflective. That's pretty masturbatory, as far as blog entries go. I am supposed to focus on concrete facts and scientific evidence about what's going on in New Orleans. Well.

There was a potluck at Nady's house last week. Alex used to talk about walking into adults' houses and wanting that for himself, and I didn't ever really understand it. Then I walked into Nady's house and suddenly that particular longing became clear. The house was small and tidy, with minimal clutter, considering all the kitschy featurettes it included. There were little craft birds hiding all over the place, and a wooden table Nady tiled herself, and a big couch with a pretty old sheet on it (because they have dogs), and a compact music studio with a keyboard and a mixing board and amplifiers and all the other equipment you would need for that sort of thing. And in the back she and her boyfriend planted herbs and vegetables and marigolds; he resurrected the fallen fence and she watered the new green plants. I wanted it BAD. James bought me an orchid and I know I'm going to accidentally kill it -- just like I killed the star flowers and the herb garden from my big fall plans.

I know there is a mouse in my bookshelf. I thought the mice were in the kitchen, because they ate through a loaf of my bread and then they pooped in my frying pan. Well, maybe they WERE in the kitchen, but then they moved to where they felt it was safer -- the bookshelf in my room where I keep my bird seed and cat food. Here are two pieces of evidence which lend themselves to the idea that there are mice in my bookshelf: 1. My cat sits and stares at the bookshelf for like hours on end and can't be distracted by anything, not even fake mice, not even eggnog. 2. I just saw a mouse. It was adorable. It was just standing there on my books. I thought, "I want to catch that mouse." But I should have known that Satchmo is infinitely more agile and quick than I could ever hope to be and he has been trying to catch these mice for the last six days. So there was no way I was going to catch this guy. He bolted into some crevice in the wall and now he is gone. Leah gave me some humane mouse traps and I put one on the shelf where I saw that mouse, and I suppose it's just a matter of time before I catch him and put him outside. I look forward to this event with all my heart.

Furthermore, there are all manners of wildlife outside my window where I put the bird feeder. I had a colony of sparrows yesterday (you think I am exaggerating, but there were at least two dozen of them, and they all wore hats which said "Sparrow Colony"); there were twin male cardinals (read: RED) two days ago; and today I have morning doves which are cooing in this low, calming whistling way that makes me kind of want to date them (?) (.).

I am in a bit of a musical rut right now. Are there new albums out there I'm not paying attention to?

80 percent fun!

My students have graduated. Avery graduated, at least, and a handful of others who tearfully received their passing GEE test scores two weeks ago and will finally get that photograph to put on their fridge of cap, gown, smile, and the symbol of "COMPLETION."

Elsewhere in the universe, Ariana Rampy graduated from Whitman College, after a slew of majors, a trek across Europe, x amount of starring roles in Harper Joy theatrical productions, and x-squared amount of all-nighters. Aileen Hamilton, too, from University of Colorado (Denver?), with a degree like Ari's in art history, and a big white canvas in front of her to paint something wild and new and original. And then roughly a week and a half ago we "matriculated" the second-year Corps members, and put their accomplishments in numbers, quantifying everything that can't be quantified, and pushed forward against the tremendous current.

I feel like I should write a Baz-Luhrman-Sunscreen speech with some haste. One year after I jumped into the ocean, I find myself with an arsenal of advice. But then, whenever has that not been true?

There are just a few things I am absolutely sure about. Most of the important things are still kind of up in the air, but you've got to start somewhere, and I can think of just a handful of tiny shreds which are Absolute Truths -- things I would have liked to have known last year, or in 2004, or whenever it was I decided to be independent 4Realz. In no order: Send birthday cards; send valentines; subscribe to magazines; keep one bottle of nice wine in the house; keep fresh flowers around as much as possible; know the single place in the universe you love to read by yourself the most (your bed doesn't count); do something really self-centered every once in a while (mani-pedis and excessive amounts of dulce de leche come to mind... preferably in conjunction); read the newspaper; spend a lot of money on dinner sometimes; complain out loud about 20% of the amount you would LIKE to complain out loud; learn to Do It Yourself (knit, fix your car, make seitan from scratch, paint interiors or exteriors or on wooden surfaces, etc.).

Now. After this year, I THINK this next one is true. But you know, this is the kind of statement I make and then less than a year later look back at and laugh out loud at because I was so many different kinds of wrong. I guess that really, everything is so complicated that something like the following statement is probably PARTIALLY true, or must be true for some portion of someone's life. Maybe it is only true for Sophie Johnson in the year 2009. Maybe it's not even true then. But. I think that you are supposed to live the things you believe. At least, I think that when you do that, you like yourself a whole lot more, and that makes you generally a lot more pleasant to be around. It is a very difficult thing to do, and I never used to do it all. Except for that whole vegan thing. And even then... I have been a VERY sloppy vegan. I will say this: I am a whole lot calmer and more satisfied with being alive when I know I haven't been doing anything knowingly wrong, per se. I like riding my bike. I like eating good, local food. I like working my ass off and coming to school as prepared as humanly possible every day. I believe in it and it makes me feel good.

Surely this will not last. It is likely that in ten years I will buy a luxurious jacuzzi bath and seventeen thousand pounds of Godiva chocolates and hole myself up in selfish excess until I weigh a metric ton and my body is a gigantic prune.

Last weekened I got to volunteer at the Special Olympics. This was totally fantastic. Here is a list of things that are totally fantastic about the Special Olympics:

1. Everyone wins a medal and gets their picture taken and gets to stand on the winners' stand, and that feels GOOD. I think. I've never won anything where you get a medal and get to stand on a stand, but it looks like fun. It looks like it is nice to be celebrated. Why don't we generally celebrate each other more often?
2. Bocce ball. Who knew?
3. The athletes train all year and are REALLY GOOD at what they do and it's just fun to watch really good athletes compete at sports.
4. Free stuff abounds.
5. People are happy to be there, very accepting and warm and open, and morale is pretty high for the whole day.

More and more this year I have started to wonder what makes us fear or reject difference. I wonder about it in myself, too... why was I so secretly unhappy when I got assigned to teach Special Ed? I know that I had opportunities to volunteer at the Special Olympics in Oregon throughout my life -- why didn't I leap at them? How is it remotely okay that we continue to live in a society in which we keep trying to shove everything that doesn't fit into our stupid little "normalcy" box into corners and away from light? And why can people still say "retard" like it's a generally acceptable insult? All obvious questions. Still, no answers.

For my birthday I had the greatest pies I've had since my mom introduced me to strawberry rhubarb and I asked seriously if it would ever be legal to marry a baked good. Leah made this mango kiwi thing which is absolutely one day going to be in a famous cookbook; Hannah did some savory vegan concoctions which seemed too good to be true; James made his first pie from scratch and it was alarmingly successful. This birthday I thought, "My. I am truly surrounded by multitalented, positive people, who are ridiculously unpretentious." I felt kind of humbled by that.

May weather in New Orleans is hot, rainy, gray, muggy, aggressive, biodiverse. There are more cockroaches and mice in my room than ever before. Outside, trees are rotting and bugs and bees and birds I had not previously acknowledged the existence of are wandering around, flitting chaotically, finding shelter when the thunderstorms are all-encompassing. Life seems to be oozing. That is the only appropriate word. As I walked down the street a week ago I practically tripped over a butterfly the size and color of a jar of blueberry jam.

The summer schedule looks like this, folks: I'll be in New Orleans until June 17thish, then driving to Colorado, then into Portland on June 25, then back to the Big Easy on July 22.

Let's hope by then I have a job again.

Fun things recently have included: A lot of really amazing cooking; volunteering all day at the New Orleans Veggie Fest, where Leah sold her baked goods and I demo-ed vegan cheese from Scotland; people pinning dollah bills to my dress in the rain on May 17; riding 16 miles on my bike for no reason in one day; new restaurants (and old ones); going to the Free Palestine lecture at UNO and learning all about the atrocious ways of the world; making clocks from empty pizza boxes and selling them on Etsy; a deluge of Crafternoonz and Veganedsays with Hannah and Leah; breakfast with James over and over again and practically beating the Crossword every time; reading like fucking crazy; listening to that rain break glass outside; my students moving forward, meaning the world to me. To name a few.

FUN!

homeostasis

At our last (LAST?) PTP session of the year Monday, we were supposed to write reflections. That's rather unsurprising. Last Events usually involve some kind of reflection. I wonder what about us makes us want to look back so much, and forward so rarely, (oh, and what about that Present Tense everyone is always talking about?), but human beings LOVE nostalgia, that's for sure. I think we tend to look back at things in black and white instead of shades of gray -- "That hike was miserable;" "That relationship was perfect in every way;" and not, "That birthday party seemed a little long but I decorated a nice paper mache plate and felt very accomplished in that."

So we were supposed to answer any number of generic questions: "What are two things you are proud of?" "What are two things you would have changed about your first year teaching?" "What have you learned about yourself?" And then we were supposed to share.

So I picked to share on that last one. What have I learned about myself?

In Chicago, eons ago, my answer to this question was:
"I have learned how to be okay."

FALSE. I must have felt pretty good about myself in that moment. Oh, Sophie, you are going to be non-crazy, homeostatic, and OKAY for the rest of your life. Congratulations, 19-year-old self! You WON! You finished growing up.

Last summer, one time, Alex didn't call me back for like a day, and I decided that he had jumped off a cliff with another woman and that I would never hear from him ever again, and I threw up all over the floor in my dorm room while sobbing like I HAD CATEGORICALLY LOST MY MIND. I can't believe Marianne still wanted to live with me after that.

This was a complicated situation, of course. As always, as anyone, I was trying to control something in my life because everything else was a big whirlwind. More than usual, existence had become a proverbial dust storm of four-hour-sleep nights padded with COMPUTERLABCOMPUTERLABCOMPUTERLAB and nightmares about car wrecks and bad food and 120-degree dry heat and far-away-from-everything-that-meant-anything-to-me-ness. I very rarely got very deep under my own skin because there was too freaking much going on on the surface, but when I did, it was uuuugly.

Excuses, excuses. The point is, I was NUTS, and totally, completely, utterly, indescribably not okay. Oops.

Now I can look back at that like a nice little closed book of events. Water-logged, disheveled, but closed, and gone, and done with. And I look back at all that and say, "That was miserable." Of course, there must have been more to it than that.

I assume the reason we see everything in black and white and not shades of gray is because if we didn't, everything would be waaaay too overwhelming, and we don't have the capacity for that what with our 20% functional brain use. I'm still pretty embedded in My First Year Of New Orleans to Look Back yet, but that's what we were supposed to do on Monday.

So I wrote,

"I learned I didn't have as thick a skin as I thought."

To me, this was an enormous revelation. Let me just say, I used to think I was about the strongest, toughest human being in the whole world. I used to think that if you shot me with a bullet, it would bounce right off, because THAT'S HOW FUCKING THICK my outer layer was.

I used to say things like, "Whatever, I'm used to it;" and "I'm not a crier." In my mind, this was a huge selling point to my person.

Well our seminar leader started LAUGHING.

"Really? You thought you had a thick skin? You are the biggest softy I think I have ever met. And it was clear the moment you walked in here."

Flinch. Really? No Rambo suit? No bullet-proof vest? I was feeling peeved, but didn't mention it because I didn't want to get into an argument.

Soft, huh? Did I not get punched in the face and bleed all over the GEE tests in November? Did I not see someone get shot under stadium lights? Did I not get surplussed and unsurplussed and surplussed again? Did I not get peed on and shit on and menstruated on and otherwise bodily functioned on every day? And I'm still here, right? That's got to count for something.

But at some point, after brooding for a few hours and feeling bad about myself, I let that go and decided to adopt it. Okay. I'm soft. I'm a crier. I melt easily. I'm delicate. I can't really stand up to anyone. I was starting to come to terms with all this already, honestly. It was time for a full-fledged embrace.

Still, "still standing." Still standing. Kinda. Limping, maybe, or hobbling around on that decrepit bike that's gone through more than I have. And now I'm about to turn 23 and I have this feeling that maaaaaaybe I'm finally learning how to be okay. But I won't be so presumptuous again, like in Chicago. At least I can sleep without "Gilmore Girls" now, and I can (sometimes) kill my own cockroach (although, anecdote: last night I cut a termite in half because I was mad at it for creeping over my papers, and the front half stayed alive and the back half died, and then I had to smash in its brain, and I cried because I felt bad for it, and then I felt pathetic, and then I ate a popsicle).

Instead of feeling full like I did leaving Chicago -- a false feeling, I now realize, and fleeting -- I feel half-empty. I feel like there is still a lot of space for a lot more STUFF. And one day (one can hope) I'll be able to look someone in the face and say all the things I really need to say.

68 percent fun!

I used to update every day about how much fun I was. I don't know how I was measuring it. I felt like I was walking around with, like, a speedometer strapped to my belly or something, and I'd check it at the end of the day and report back to you. Now that I have distanced myself (at large, for better or worse) from the blogosphere, I wonder if it makes me more or less fun. You'd automatically think more, because being off the Internet means I'm out, probing the world and enjoying existence. But that's actually wrong; I've just started pouring myself into my job kinda HELLA.

Which feels at times a little meaningless because last Friday I got surplussed for next year. That basically just means I won't be at my school next year because they don't have the budget to pay for me anymore. Oh, the economy. Yes, it's a little crushing. Luckily, I don't have to think about it just now; I can think about tomorrow or the day after tomorrow and not worry about the fact that all these relationships I spent the whole year painstakingly building must be shelved in July and I'll have to start from scratch; a whole new series of failings and successes that I can't even imagine right now.

Still, I feel like I am pretty fun. This weekend I took my students SCUBA diving with Mr. D, which was extraordinary. Before you start to flip out (you are inevitably already flipping out), you should know that we did this in a pool, and not in the Atlantic Ocean. I thought that sounded kind of lame, too, until I DID IT, and it was AWESOME. You sink to the bottom of a pool and you can BREATHE UNDERWATER. Regardless of my notorious fear of fish, I think I would like to one day ACTUALLY SCUBA dive in a real life ocean. And see some real life sea creatures, and touch some real life kelp.

And then after that Leah and I rode bikes in the Cinco de Mayo parade, which was quintessentially New Orleans (Leah: "Only in New Orleans would it be so acceptable to dress up like Mexicans and hand out Doritos on the streets"). This was an EXHAUSTING but brilliant Saturday, all in all. My bike, which I have been practically abusing with the amount I am riding it, is now decorated in enormous red and white plastic dahlias; lilies; garlands. It's a good look for ole Kim. In the parade we strapped a gigantic paper mache boro head to my handlebars, which was rough for my balance, but awesome in every other respect. It was a fringe parade, and Antonio danced around like an ecstatic firefly, handing people fresh jalapenos, dancing with tourists and strangling trees with beads. There was a pinata; a hat dance; the taco truck; "Tequila!"; and plenty of almost-inappropriate jokes about swine flu.

This, among other things, brought me joy this weekend. I know that I am not a grown up yet solely because I keep feeling like I am a grown up. That feeling is familiar; I assume when I am ACTUALLY a grown up I will quit feeling like I am one and will start paying taxes and discussing A27 politics more than I do now.

James came over and killed the most offensive of the cockroaches (it is not an exaggeration to say that it was larger than a small bird), and the rest were offed unceremoniously with a can of Raid sprayed strategically in cracks and around trash cans. Satchmo is really bored of cockroaches now and has moved onto all things bigger and better. For example, three days ago he chased a small mouse into my bed. I thought this was adorable; James thought it was evidence that my house needed to be immediately vacated. Whatever; I caught it and took it outside and hoped Satchmo hadn't stored a pile of its dead relatives somewhere in my closet. I can't fault New Orleans for being a place where so many organisms desire to just LIVE. I saw a kind of flower today that was a color of hot pink I had previously thought was invented by Mattel solely for Barbie; I never imagined it would occur in nature.

I am really trying to stop being a crier. I cry when I watch those AT&T commercials where the girl and the boy get separated and the boy sends all those iPhone messages or whatever... no seriously, I tear up BAD. I'm trying to stop doing this. I want to be way more tough. Maybe if I was a little bit better at video games.

Sunday night and I'm ready. I'm wrapping my arms around May and welcoming the summer as it topples on us all at once.

open letters.

Dear Cockroaches:

This is just not going to work. I understand why you thought it was, what with my excessive love letters to New Orleans and my years upon years of veganism and my scheduled class trip to the Insectarium. You thought we could live in peace together, and I don't blame you for that. It almost might have been possible at one point in time, too. But if you had wanted to have a good coexistance, here are some choices you should NOT have made:

1. You should have chosen to NOT grow to be the size of mice. I mean, really. Bugs?! The size of MICE?!?! That is not supposed to be a thing. You are not supposed to do that. You are supposed to stay the size of bugs, like all the rest of the bugs do, and just chill the fuck out. But no. You all go off ballooning to unprecedented lengths and widths and then you scuttle about and you have little hairs on your legs and it is not attractive AT ALL.
2. You should have persuaded the cockroach who just FELL FROM THE CEILING ONTO MY FACE to have NOT climbed the ceiling. You KNOW your feet are notoriously slick. When he climbed up onto the ceiling, you should have ALL BEEN ALREADY AWARE that he was going to fall onto my face, and you should have TOLD HIM not to climb up there in the first place. Poor choices, gentlemen.
3. Likewise, you should have told your comrade who thought it wise to chill out in the cat food bag all day that when he jumped out of the bag, he should try NOT to jump onto my leg and NOT to climb up to my knees.
4. And for the love of God, fellows, STOP EATING MY FOOD! It's MINE. That is what the garbage is for. When I leave a nice biscuit on a plate on the stove to eat when I get home from work, I want to be able to come home from work and pick up the biscuit and put it in my mouth without also putting a cockroach in my mouth. Which is what I did today. And I'm sure it wasn't pleasant for that cockroach, either. That's what greed will get you, cockroach. Learn your place.
5. When you look at me with your freaky, hard-shell-eye-faces, please stop giving me looks that say, "I am going to pounce on you and eat you," or, alternately, "I am right now laying hundreds of eggs all over your house." These are not particularly alluring statements to make with your eyes, and they make me scared.

Maybe I should have told you sooner that there were rules. I believed that they could go unwritten. But regardless, a line has been crossed, and you are just going to have to leave. Please go out through the tiniest crack in the window I have left near my desk. If not, enjoy the debilitating roach spray I have spread across the floors and cracks of every part of my house. It smells dreadful, even to me.

It's not me, it's you. I am a pretty patient person. You are a disgusting insect with no evolutionary purpose. We are done here. Oh, and don't forget to give me back my black T-shirt.

Sincerely,
Sophie



Dear Dead and Rotten Tooth In My Mouth:

I am sorry I haven't had you removed yet. My health insurance does not cover dental. I noticed that yesterday you turned brown, and I'm sure that's very hard for you. I want to give you a hug, but it's rather difficult due to your present location.

I know it's a lot to ask, and I mostly just harass you by rubbing sugar and carbs into you, but would mind not causing the rest of my mouth to seize up in pain? Just because you're in a tough situation is no reason to be a bully.

Awesome! Talk to you tomorrow!

Love,
Sophie

50 percent fun!

I swear, I have never gone camping so much in my entire life as I have this year. It's kind of interesting, considering that I have also never been so busy, or had so little time to go camping. I don't know that I even loved camping all that much as a child. Don't get me wrong, it certainly wasn't awful. Here are things that used to be awesome about camping:
1. S'Mores. Did you ever try to make S'Mores in your microwave? Because IT JUST WASN"T THE SAME, right? You needed to marshmallows to be perfectly seared on the outside from a camp fire. Tasting a little bit of pine on the skin of your marshmallow was actually the best part. To tell you the truth, I was one of those "just fucking burn it" marshmallow people. I liked them black. Preferably all the way to the middle.
2. My dog. Dogs think camping is THE BEST. They constantly run up to you with the face of a kid on Christmas: "WHY can't we do this EVERY DAY?" they say. And you say, "Because we have jobs and lives that aren't in the woods." Then the dog says, "What is a 'job?'" And then you throw the dog a stick and the dog LOVES IT.
3. Mom and Dad are way more likely to play games than they would be if they were not camping. And they'll even play games that are not even respectable games, such as "Run Through The Woods and Throw Pennies At Anything That Moves."
4. My sister and I were better imagineers than anyone else in the history of time. I'm convinced that this is true, and the moment we outgrew it I started to hate myself a little bit. We had an arsenal of make-believe games which we could only play when we were on vacation. The woods was a particularly good place to do this because there were way more things which could be other things. For example, fir trees could be secret government hide-outs; pine cones could be tiny bombs; pine NEEDLES could be secret recording devices planted by the Head of the Forest; bugs could be fairy messengers; etc. etc. etc.

Now I think what I love the most about camping is listening to the sounds outside when you're inside a tent. Two weeks ago, when we went camping in the thunderstorm, I had never heard anything so incredible as the thunder crashing like so many steel pots on the kitchen floor, and the rain pounding fists on the outside of my tent. Also, there is bird-watching, which I only get more emphatic about as I get older. Blame my mother.

Memorable camping trips through time:

1. The time we saw the diamond-back rattlesnake. I remember this with absolute clarity, unlike most of the memories from when I was seven. We had our bikes on this camping trip, and I had just evolved past training wheels. My parents made cocktails in the woods, which then seemed utterly normal, and now seems badass as fuck. We decided to all go on a hike as a family, which was actually not very common back then, because Alexis and I weren't yet old enough to appreciate hikes. I think to pass the time Allie and I probably sang very annoying songs very loudly and repetitively. Anyway, right around where this picture was taken, we started hearing this rattle -- and I was actually at the front of the hiking train, so I was the one who first saw the HUMONGOUS SNAKE slip across the trail. It appeared, at the time, big enough to entirely consume my family and still have room for dessert. Dad said, "Stay very still," and we all stood there in terror, acting like we weren't there. When I was seven, this was the closest I thought I would ever come to death. We retold the story over and over again, embellishing here and there so that it was clear that the rattlesnake was hungry, and had eaten human beings before. Now, in New Orleans, rattlesnakes, constrictors, and adders are commonplace in the swamp, and you just kind accept them as facts of life. Ah, how things have changed.

2. The time we had to camp on the beach and it was cold. This probably wasn't as bad as I remember it being. I remember being promised a beach camping trip, and picturing running in my bathing suit along the shore line. I remember picturing building a sand castle in my tent (bad idea, I now understand). But of course, that fantasy was doomed from the beginning, because my family is from OREGON, and we camp at the OREGON COAST, and even when you visit the beach in the middle of the hottest months of August you can't wear a bathing suit because it will STILL be too cold. Also, when you go camping on the beach, you do not actually go camping ON THE BEACH. You camp NEAR the beach, in the woods. So there's nothing really all that special about it, except that you can walk to the beach from your campsite. Well, la-di-da. Nothing about that seemed all that extraordinary to me. Shortly after we camped "on the beach," my grandmother died and my mom and her three sisters pooled the money Grandma Dorothy left and bought a beach house at Gleneden. Which is still, I think, one of the most perfect places in the universe. So now when we go to the beach and it is cold, we can go INSIDE a house afterwards, and watch Disney Channel.

3. The time Jessica, Ben, Katie, and I went on a road trip. This was after sophomore year of college, and I think we just decided it was about time we went on a road trip, because that is something that college students do. We camped every night, except one night when we got lost and almost hit a skunk and were traumatized, and thus ended up needing to sleep at a skeezy motel; and the night we spent with Ariana Rampy at her house in Nevada City. This trip had a lot going for it. For example, it included more than one camp site at which we were able to swim in a river or lake. There is really nothing I like more than swimming in natural bodies of water. Because I feel like I have already blogged about this, I will reference now the 2006 LiveJournal entry I made about this whole experience. It's a winning post, let me tell you. A selected quote is what you would like? Ok, I guess I can do that:

the ground of the lake felt really soft and unsettling, and there were tiny dead moths all over the surface. the swallows would swoop in and eat them off! jessica and ben and i fought with water. we dueled. jessica won the duel, ultimately. then jessica and i climbed over all this brush and hiked for a few miles along a highway that overlooked the lake. every few seconds we were required to stop and be spellbound. we held hands and talked about boys and boys and sometimes family. for dinner we had bread and cheese and tofurky and lettuce.

Young Sophie really did know how to describe her camping experiences. Never missed a beat, that one.

4. The time Mac and I went camping. Regardless of all the times I have told my boyfriends "Hey! We should go camping!" Mac was the only boy with whom that actually ever happened (and more than once, at that!). This one was kind of a doomed camping trip, though, because there was a massive thunder storm in a very flat wheat field, and we forgot while we were driving if you are supposed to stay inside a car if the car is the tallest thing in the vicinity and lightning is jutting into the ground in front of you. You are. But we forgot that, and we got out of the car and lay on the ground because we were pretty sure we had pretty strong chances of dying. In the end we found a lackluster campsite and played Scrabble inside a tent. My main memory of this adventure is being very in love with life, and finding a little snail on the ground with which I was completely enamored. I guess I was just in one of those annoying transcendentalist moods. Mac was always very accepting of those.

5. The time Alexis and I almost died because our car flipped over. But before that, there was camping. And the camping was fun. Presumably, had our car NOT flipped over, we would have continued to have a fun time camping in this R.E.I. tent Alexis bought and thought was the shit. It was small and kind of cozy to sleep in with another person, but it was also the shit. We had really good camping food too, like cereal, and dried fruit, and sandwich stuff, and all that stuff got totally ruined during that car accident. Too bad insurance doesn't cover your great camping food.

So that was camping in the past. This year we have already taken the kids camping several times, and it is going to happen again in less than a week. I am getting pretty OK at pitching a tent. It seemed like a Mensa puzzle when I was a kid, and it has only recently gotten to be something I've felt remotely competent at. Before I started going on the school camping trips I would always go camping with someone who knew how to pitch a tent; someone who in fact took great pride in their tent-pitching capabilities; and someone who required no help, except for when they would sometimes say something like, "Can you shake this rain fly out for me?" And I never had any qualms with that.

I guess I mention all this because right now I am in the world's most comfortable bed at my grandmother's house, a day after Easter and the week after three incredible Passover Seders, and my Spring Break is unfolding thusly: I will leave Southern California tomorrow in the earliest hours of morning, and get in a car with James Hamilton, and we will drive to the Ozarks and CAMP. Then I will get in a car with James Hamilton on Friday and drive to New Orleans, Louisiana, where I will get in a car with four bright-eyed high school students and drive to somewhere in Mississippi where we will pitch MORE tents and see MORE outdoor scenery. Can't I get some kind of badge for all this camping? Or, rather, shouldn't I write a letter to Whitman College telling them that I FINALLY meet the requirements of being a student there (a year too late)?

Camping is fun. Southern California is relaxing (hence the bed). But there's a quiet storm in the form of lesson plans and PAS work that I am always avoiding, and which is looking me square in the eyes saying, "Sophie, you're going to probably try to cut off your appendages if you don't begin to address me soon." So I can't fill up on fun. Not until the summer, when everything dies down, and I return to the Blogosphere to complain of boredom.

funbo.

Wow. It's been an unbelievably long time. Unbelievably. You can't believe it.

New Orleans in spring is absolutely my favorite thing in the known universe; it can only be described as emulating pages and pages of graphic novels I only wish I could write, about the quirkiest, rosiest, most erratic and messy and totally breathtaking place in the universe. Vignettes really don't suffice (Man on one of those tall, tall bikes rides down the cobblestone paths under the highway while a bright white egret pecks at empty bags of seafood-flavored potato chips; little girl with pink and white paint on her face lounges on a rusty pink lawn chair under a tent with her family, who play in a jazz sextet all afternoon on one of those offshoot streets near Decatur; rotting house erupts in a rash of butter-yellow flowers all over the roof, like some giant angelic mythical beast sneezed there randomly or something). It's caterpillar season. The caterpillars are 1) abundant; 2) black and fuzzy; 3) ABUNDANT. And you know what comes next: butterfly season.

Ari visited x weeks ago. Enchanting, obviously. The best day, to paint it for you, was when we rode the ferry to Algiers in the 70-degree weather and found ourselves the only two people at the world's most freakishly adorable coffee shop, playing Scrabble with the old-fashioned board, and drinking sweet tea with lemon. There was also strawberry shortcake, car rides with the window down, tromping tramping trolloping through City Park, outlandish meals involving barbecue shrimp cheesecake, and of course everything else New Orleans has to offer. Ariana felt like a missing puzzle piece. As if she was saying, "I know you knew something was slightly amiss before. You felt a lack; well baby, I'm it."

And beyond that, work is exhausting and overwhelming and world is unraveling at approximately 250 million miles per hour. There are just too many festivals and friends and meals and causes and NOT ENOUGH HOURS IN THE DAY. So I decided to break my summer up between New Orleans and Colorado and Portland and to rest and relax and breathe and take each instant at a time, because I'm rotten at doing that in general. It's been A LOT of summers since I've given myself that kind of freedom.

I kind of know that attempting to blog about all this is not only futile, it's counterproductive because I tend to come off as really pretentious when I'm trying to get something really enormous across -- like a huge desire or a big love of some kind. But I wanted you to know that I have not disappeared off the face of the earth, and I'm not lying beneath some semi-moist rocks crying my eyes out and woeing about the state of the universe.

I'm going to Leah's seder on Thurdsay; Philip's seder on Wednesday; my grandmother's house on Friday; camping with James on Tuesday (SPRING BREAK WIN); camping with my students again on Friday... EXHAUSTING, RIGHT?! We actually went camping last weekend, and it was A THUNDERSTORM. That was about the most badass outdoorsy thing I've ever done, and I have to admit, I wasn't always the best sport about the six or ten feet of water inundating our camp site. But I did my best, and my students did their best, and in the end we got to see the historic Vicksburg, Mississippi, where integral battles of the Civil War were fought (cooler than I think I'm making it sound).

Hannah fixed my bike; I have been eating much more exotic kinds of pizza than I ever have before; Totally Vegan Potluck is the best thing that has ever happened to my palate; it is 70 degrees basically every day; we saw the Human Rights Film Festival; my heart has been shifting between bursting with joy and tucking in on itself from being overwhelmed. And sometimes it breaks. Because school is harder and harder every day and the realities of the education gap are clearer and clearer, and the shitty stuff is more and more obvious.

But as always, c'est la vie. ONWARD.