Echo

One man will grieve for you.
The other will dream of you.

There are times in life when no matter how much you want to, there are certain people you can’t sleep with and still consider yourself a responsible adult. Perhaps that recognition is what makes you an adult.
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Cause in my head there’s a greyhound station
Where I send my thoughts to far off destinations
So they may have a chance of finding a place
where they’re far more suited than here.

-Death Cab, Soul Meets Body

Computer crash. Lost work. Was fairly zen about it, and just attempted to recreate.

In the last month, have met 3 people who have said english majors have an advantage over other people. They said they always win or they’re hard to go up against because they have more tools, or as one guy said, same tools but know more ways to use them. I’ve never heard people talk about a person having an english major as having power. But I think it’s less to do with the major (people major in what interests them) but about the love of verbal dexterity.
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Last night…I couldn’t even get an answer. Help me picture him at least. The problem was, I never had a type. Always just figured I would recognize him and know what to do when I saw him. I do know what his hands should look like.
By the way, don’t lie. Everyone knows you have a type. You’re just in denial because you hate the fact you have a type.
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Everyone is a star in someone’s universe.
Everyone is a god to some level of world.

Go kart racing to determine the fate of an unborn baby. Wow, Sarah Silverman. Wow.
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How can I recognise a little caterpillar long after it’s turned into a butterfly?

Beautiful line!

This is a story I keep forgetting to tell when I manage to get internet access. But I want to mention it.

It was Saturday and I was driving across Washington to the coast. My GPS didn’t tell me until I got there, but I even had to take a car ferry over. I’ve never done that before, and all I knew about them was from the TV show Grey’s Anatomy where I believe there was one episode where one of these boats capsized (or was blown up) to utter catastrophe. The ride was uneventful, and I just remember the car behind me was this tall guy and his wife driving an orange Nissan Z. I was looking at it and asking him about it, because I’m thinking about the Infiniti G37 (though I’m in love with the handling of the FX). This is a tangent, but we talked about cars, and I was checking out his, and then a night later, I saw their car parked outside the same place I’m staying at in La Push. What a small world.

Anyway, I was texting with Curtis, and mentioned that when I stopped for gas, I’d seen Drifter IPA in the cold display. He likes trying different beers and sending me pictures of the bottles. Drifter was one he’d sent a week or so ago. He texted back, “I like when you find things that remind you of me. Do you feel like a fairy?”

I wrote back that I think I’m just really good at finding things, that I’m more of a magnet than a fairy, that sometimes I fnd things that make people believe in more.

He wrote back, “Find god for me.”

I got chills when I read that. This is something I could do. Every person’s god is personal. It’s a matter of them seeing and believing in signs that seem to add up to more than just mere coincidence. It’s about timing. Like the time my mother was at her most desperate and thinking about suicide, and her car’s radio display suddenly went blank and tuned into one station, a gospel station, and a man telling her that God loved her, God understood and God wanted her to hang on. But you have to be willing to believe and you have to be open to seeing. It’s like the Indiana Jones first step of faith. If you believe it, it will be there.

So I wrote back, “Do you really want me to?” Who better to point out signs than me, who has made a life’s work and calling out of following signs. But I didn’t want to waste my time if he was just fucking around.

“I’d believe,” he wrote back.

“Are you open to believing god exists for you, and are you open to whatever form god appears in?” I knew if he answered yes to both those questions, and truly did both, very likely he would get his proof.

“Sure. She may be you,” he wrote.

Funny. I’m not. But I’m a good messenger.

“Okay, Curtis. Remember that you asked to be shown then let it go. Take every moment forward in your life openly, honestly with attention. Look for the connections. Most of all, believe the greater picture will become clear. And yes, I hope I can be there when you witness it.”

Finding proof of god and universe is like finding love. It appears when you least expect it.

His response is just a little smiley face and I kind of feel like he’s just humoring me. And then he send me this picture, to show me the new beer he’s drinking:

I was more astounded by the words in the background of the picture. I wrote back asking him if he’d posed the picture that way on purpose.

“Over my bed?” he asked.

I asked if he’d randomly just taken a picture of the bottle or if he said to himself that he needed all those background elements. He said nothing was on purpose, that he’d had to turn that way because of glare.

He’d asked me to find god for him, which to me just means find signs that make him believe there’s something around us, outside of us, a greater interconnectedness at work. He said that he’d believe, and I asked him if he was open to believing that god existed and willing to be open to whatever form he came in (I was talking about signs, evidence). Next I asked him to let go of the question and look for the connections. And he randomly sends me a picture with “I want to believe” in the background, and those words weren’t included consciously, on purpose.

I asked him if would accept what just happened as proof of magic or if he needed more.

“Who said I didn’t believe in magic?” he asked.

“Believing in magic is the first step in believing in god,” I said.

Herholz’s film based on a short story I’m trying to track down. I just remembered it two nights ago and messaged him to see if he had it online. Under short films, top right. Two men in a missile silo. Oh, Herholz is the actor from my Match.com spec. Great guy. Took me to the airport at 6 in the morning once on his birthday which I appreciated. Your classic Aquarius–brilliant, independent and eccentric.  We’re both terribly good-looking and terribly shy. Thus, we’ve always just been friends. :) Thanks, Max.

Necklace

Somewhere in 2008, my lucky necklace disappeared. It was a small diamond circle with one square below it. It was an engagement present from my uncle to my aunt, but when they got married, he got her a nicer one and she gave this one to me. I rarely took it off and one day, it was just gone. David knew about me losing that necklace and being bummed so for Christmas, he gave me one that was a circle with 9 diamonds that each measured 9 across. He had it custom-made to honor my favorite number. Shortly after was the last time we saw each other, but due to habit, I still wore the necklace, making it about the 9 and mine rather him. My mom was always telling me to stop wearing it, and on the cruise to Alaska, my aunt saw it and liked it, so we made a deal that I would give it to her after the cruise. For my birthday the month before, my dad had given me a necklace (probably at my mom’s request) so I had put the 9 one in the safe in our room and wore the necklace my dad gave me instead, planning to give it to my aunt when we got off the boat.

It was the strangest thing. The necklace disappeared. While in the safe. Along with earrings my dad had gotten my mom. We didn’t realize because my mom had opened the safe and thought I had taken everything when she found it empty, but I hadn’t. We didn’t realize until after we were off the boat.

I was a little upset but a part of me felt like maybe outside forces wanted me to stop wearing it. It was my last tie to David. It needed to be severed. I understood. I felt worse about my mom’s earrings.

Then last month, when I was home in Fremont, my mom said she wanted to talk to me about something that should stay between us. While we were on the cruise, we shared a cabin with my mom’s friend. I didn’t know her, and she was high energy, a little eccentric. I had asked how they knew her, and my mom said the family knew her growing up and sometimes she spent time with my grandma. She said the reason she was on this trip with us was because she had been at my aunt’s house when my mom came over to finalize the trip plans and she had said she wanted to go, and it would have been awkward to say no. After spending time with her, I remember it was strange that she spent most of her time complaining about my grandmother, like they were lifelong childhood rivals. But she was my mom’s age.

“You remember how your necklace and my earrings were missing? I didn’t want to tell you this, but I always wondered if she had something to do with it,” my mom said.

She said that after we got off the boat, while we had been at the airport in Vancouver, her friend had asked to borrow Canadian money since all she had was US. My mom thought it was weird because all the shops take credit card. But she gave her a 20. Later, her friend came back but said she hadn’t bought anything, but had accidentally dropped the bill in a McDonald’s bag the kids were eating from and thrown it away. My mom always thought it was a strange story.

I should pause here and mention that my aunt, my mom’s sister, thought this woman was bona fide crazy. I don’t know what she thought of her before, but I remember once we got home, my aunt turned to me and said, “We have met a real crazy person!” “Who?” I asked and she said their friend.

So my mom recounted that strange exchange, and said that a month after the cruise, she got a letter in the mail from her friend. In it was a check for $100 and a letter. She wrote that as kids, she’d always been jealous of my mom for how smart she was and her successes (my mom was chosen as a school diplomat to travel to the Philippines). So one day, she stole money from her while she was at their house. She said that after the cruise, my mom had treated her so kindly and been such a good friend, and she had felt guilty for so long that she had to confess and return the money.

My mom said she had long wondered if her friend had something to do with the disappearance of what was in the safe, if she had flung these things into the ocean for whatever reason. But it was such a disaturbing thought, that she didn’t want to vocalize it, but the sudden emergence of this confession and this letter made this intuition buck to the forefront of her mind again.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not going to ask her. I just chalk it up to a loss. But all I know is there’s something strange about that woman, something that doesn’t add up.”

In the meantime, the chain on the necklace my dad gave me broke one day, shortly after the cruise. As I was putting it away, I found a necklace of Chinese jade, in the shape of a gourd, on a red string. A traditional lucky necklace. It looked incredibly familiar, except I have no idea where it came from, who it came from. But it felt right, and I’ve been wearing that ever single day. Don’t know why or what it is or where it came from, only that its what I’m supposed to be doing for now.

I’m sitting here, reading about the guy getting a postcard from the Orange Girl and how she must be in Orange Land. I’m sitting in a diner and giggling to myself for reasons I may someday (possibly soon) reveal. I suddenly remember one morning in Seattle when I had woken up to someone in my room standing next to me, the ghost from a dream, so close he was almost there, utterly familiar but utterly faceless. I remember the dream being bathed in orange. That dream had been disjointed but the color had been memorable. I just typed in “orange dream” into the blog search box, hoping I had remembered to log it so I would know what day that was. Sure enough, November 7th, 2009, a 29 day. And another surprise synchronicity– the word “lichen.”
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It’s cool. When I have something to say, I send an email to Echo. So who is Echo to me, and what is Echo to you?

There are two types who when mixed, create a force akin to helium. They turn into mutual balloons. As these balloons float up in the air, they become unwitting magnets for lightning. Those two are currently lucky they have an invisible 3rd party grounding the electricity. But it’s time to think about landing.

We always go back to the scene of the crime. Whatever age you were, whatever place you were, you will always find yourself back one night. The difference is if you walk through with your eyes opened or closed.

When you travel through other people’s dreams, you must always get back by daybreak, in the fear that the dreamworld will replace your real world. I often find that I can breathe underwater, but it is under the clutch of those I love that threatens to drown me. I think people should always share their dreams about each other. It gives us clues to where we go in our other lives.

My favorite dreams are of new living spaces, usually close to water. And exploring this space and finding all kinds of secret rooms and passageways, and being able to think, this is mine. I love the idea of having a warm home where all the people I like can gather. Whenever I have those dreams it reminds me to push forward towards finding.

What is the difference between Julia Living and Julia Working. It’s one of those questions I’ve had to meditate on. There’s so much difference and yet on some level, completely no difference. I think it’s about timing. Of your versions with your roles. If I’m being Julia Living in the workplace, it’s probably more inappropriate than if I had Julia Working there. I would be very casual to social boundaries, contentious with authority, flirt with both male and female coworkers to see what I can get away with, and bully either the person directly above me if he’s male, or below me if she’s female, while still somehow getting the job done faster than anyone has ever done it. I would be well loved, well loathed, and well feared. My sole motivations would be correlated with my degree of boredom.

Julia Living needs more space to operate.

Julia Working is straight-line task- oriented. She doesn’t understand nuance and just wants to get it done. Great for professionalism and career advancement. Completely denies social aspects. When I don’t have the boundaries of having a place and time to exercise my professional and goal-oriented energies, I start turning my personal life into a project.

There’s a time and place for each side of you and sometimes it’s about arranging your life so the best of you can be in its best situation. Or maybe after some time, you get a feel for the timing.

It takes time to forget someone so you can find them again.
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You were thinking about Olivia, weren’t you?
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And your skin is so right…underneath the black night…
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Missile Silo.

History.

hail!

Everything is just perfect right now. Got the full moon today through tomorrow, I’m in a little apartment overlooking the ocean as it storms every night, and it feels like a portal has opened up around me. This book is exactly what I need at this exact moment. I got to the part yesterday where the main character finds the Orange Girl at the cafe and sits down at her table, and she reaches for his hand, and it’s just this moment. And I started laughing because I had written the night before I started the book about sitting down with strangers, holding their hand and their life unfolds.

I don’t know if these synchronicities actually mean anything outside of being fun and giving me a general feeling that I’m moving in the right direction, on the right track. They’re like a voice telling me I’m getting warmer, as I search to find that hidden key.

Wouldn’t it have been infinitely worse if we’d first been able to see each other every day for six months and then never met again?

This line made me feel sad and guilty.

The beach from where I’m staying. This obstacle course must be climbed every day, rain or shine!