25 things.

this is the thing to do right now, i guess.

25 random things about me:

1. i'd rather it be 20 degrees outside than 90. i hate sweating more than anything.
2. i spend an embarrassingly large amount of time watching things you youtube. i am not proud of this.
3. i was born in l.a.
4. the end of "mr. holland's opus" always makes me cry. every.single.time.
5. my first car was a white '93 honda accord. sometimes i wish i still had it.
6. i love sending packages to people. you might say it's my love language.
7. right now, my hair is the longest it's ever been. this probably means i'll chop it all off soon.
8. i'm addicted to diet coke.
9. my 2nd grade teacher only had half a fingernail on her pointer finger and it scared the crap out of me.
10. i miss eating breakfast at wolfgangs with my friends every week.
11. forever and always george clooney will be my celebrity crush.
12. i hate running. every second of it. but i do it anyway.
13. i have gone to 3 backstreet boys concerts.
14. when we were little, my best friend and i made a time capsule-threw a bunch of stuff in a shoebox so that future generations could learn about us. i'm not sure we ever buried it.
15. i love choir.
16. i just bought a bag for $300. and it's beautiful and i feel fine about it.
17. i could live on bread and cheese. but then would be obese.
18. i like white wine better than red wine. this probably means i am not as classy as some people i know.
19. i love 'the west wing'.
20. the stone wall in a field behind a manor house in london is my happy place.
21. i am not a pleasant person before 9am. Don't talk to me.
22. sometimes i talk to myself outloud in my car. i have a long commute. stop laughing.
23. i miss sitting in college classes and learning things. i had no idea how good i had it.
24. i am most comfortable in a t-shirt and jeans.
25. daily make-up essential: mascara

thread, not wax.

i got my eyebrows shaped yesterday.
wax and my skin do not get along, so i get them threaded instead.
i go to this little indian lady named dipty. she is amazing.

this is what it looks like:

i just really like billy collins.

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."