Unfinished business on the BART

He's at the window seat with his eyes closed and headphones on. His backpack is on the seat next to him. We're crowded in a five-car train, and I sit on the armrest of the aisle seat with my bag slung over my shoulder, my back to him.

Suddenly there's a violent push against my back, where my bag rests. "Get your shit off my shit."

Face Painted Fun

I went to a circus skill share last night, and there renewed both my desire and will to juggle, and also my absolute need to learn how to ride a unicycle.

Sadly, our unicycle resides in Georgia where we had first picked it up, and most likely we won't be shipping it back because the cost wouldn't be worthwhile. On the other hand, the Bay Area seems to always have two or five people trying to sell their unicycles on craigslist.

I have a huge desire to make food right now, but alas I'm stuck at work instead.

Halloween is around the corner and I need a big idea for a good costume. I thought about making myself into a human puppet with some sort of contraption attaching me to a large wire figure (or hand) that would appear to be making me move, only I'd be moving it. An illusion, if you will.

But that would require attention and probably money that I'm not ready to devote. I think I can come up with something better and fun before then.

Sandpapercuts

Out of all of us younger cousins, which rounds to four, the last one expected to get married first was my cousin Francis.

I just attended his wedding on Saturday, and it was a bittersweet experience. I told my boyfriend that I thought this marriage was preposterous (in finer tongue) , that I didn't even want to go. It's been two years since I last saw Francis, and probably a good seven since I really hung out with him.

Things change. People change. It's the hardest pill to swallow, as inevitable as it is, and I fall so easily to forgetting that fact. Welcoming it, embracing its consistency is much easier than coming to terms with the actual change itself.

The last time I remember actually hanging out with Francis, I was visiting from college. We'd gone to eat pizza with my sister and catch up, and he was pushing a sales pitch I couldn't appreciate. Ambition I can admire, but trying to bounce business ethics off me just seemed dirty.

I look back on that now, and realize we all face obstacles and hard paths to pull through on. Sometimes we make wrong choices. Either way, there's the constant struggle to understand ourselves and our decisions -- at least, for most people. Well, at least for myself. I can't relate to what ideas were going on in his head then, but this was still the same cousin I played "submarine" with in our aunt's giant marble bathtub on many occasions, or tag, or robbers, or what have you. He had his own ideas to work out at the time, and seven years is time enough for some of that change to occur.

It took the wedding to remind me. Watching him bob his head nervously. There was no trace of the eager businessman. This was Francis older and beyond his eager bid for conventional success. This might be the Francis who still thinks Natalie Portman is one of the hottest woman alive, but this was still Francis. It felt good to be there, despite my initial misgivings about possible ulterior motives. In the end, those misgivings merely reflected my own suspicious nature. And I'm glad.

Sometimes I think it comes off as too much pride, my opinions and my carriage, but really I feel so wholly incomplete and lost in where I stand in life that my faltering confidence tends to manifest itself that way. Overprotecting a vulnerable part of myself that most people wouldn't even consider attacking me for. Or anyone whose opinion matters to me, anyway. Or that anyone's opinion should matter.

I ended up enjoying the wedding, despite a stomach flu I still hadn't recovered from, being cold, and being stuck in a dress that I actually have outgrown. Somehow I still manage to keep growing...the bodice was literally crushing my ribs. I don't feel bigger. Maybe it's secretly an indication that I should really be buying myself some new clothes. Considering how empty my closet is, and how I wear two items to death, this might not be a bad thing.

At any rate, I cried when they got married. If anything about the wedding was preposterous, it was the amount of Jesus Christ that got stuffed into the ceremony, but as an atheist, agnostic, apathetic, I guess that is a given. I just didn't see the correlation, and it really just sounded like a lot of unrelated propaganda forced into twenty minutes of vows and love.

Weddings as a whole don't really interest me, but after a week of horrible stomach pains, and transitions in my life (and in my mind), a lot of unanswered questions...it's nice to just remember to breathe, to see people so happy, to see people laughing and joking and loving each other, even in the midst of any other kind of suffering personal or other. Life goes on. With me.