coffee talk

i haven't talked about coffee in a while.

unfortunately, a lot of this has to do with not working with coffee anymore (in fact, i don't think i've talked much coffee since i jumped ships with blogs).

here enters the verisimo 801:

officially? not a bad machine... if it were 2005 and its plastic parts didn't clip off so easily in the middle of a downtown seattle rush. also not bad if it's double wands were covered or could move about more freely. maybe if the hoppers were larger that would be better, or if it wasn't an automatic machine altogether. honestly? i hate this machine. starbucks started replacing their semi-automatic machines with these bad boys a few years back and i have to say, "training" on these machines is a lot faster, but there's no real coffee experience when you get to the bottom of it. baristas trained on these machines lose the knowledge of what effort goes into making coffee, and on top of that the flavor extraction is bitter.

every time.

so boys and girls are "learning" about coffee but the real art was lost as soon as these machines moved in. while starbucks have moved on to bigger and (admittedly) better automatic machines i can't help but ask, was the loss of real, honest coffee experiences worth the automatic upgrade? i can't say it was worth it.

the book of three

"leave all your love and your longing behind, you can't carry it with you if you want to survive"

one more for good measure

"fuck this is awesome"

out finding life.

i need to develop my film and my heart.

i'm ill, not sick.

"this is bullshit" i thought to myself. i'd been lying in bed for three or four day, only getting up to make the occasional peanut butter and jelly or when i thought i was going crazy and needed air. i'd been sick, but i'd been wondering if maybe i was on the downhill roll toward being depressed.

bullshit.

i don't have time to be sick OR depressed.

it's hard to explain of you haven't really experienced it. being depressed i mean. it's like any other illness, it comes out of nowhere and sort of sucks you dry. it's exhausting being in it but it's exhausting trying to pull yourself out of it, and even though people say "just snap out of it"... you.... can't. either way, i didn't have time for any of it, i had a shit ton of deadlines to make and i didn't have time to be sick. or depressed.

dammit.

i walked to school a few times just to pretend i was okay. do you ever do that? just try and pretend you're fine even though it's obvious nothing's alright? i could feel my eyes bloodshot from allergies and sinus infections, my nose was running and raw from blowing it every other minute, my whole body ached.

"i'll just pretend i'm fine," i told myself. who the hell doesn't do that, right? i got dressed, put on make up, packed my backpack and went to emerald city smoothie. perfect. energy boost, vitamin c, and some protein: just what i need. i'd be fine in no time!

"i'm great! i'm doing fantastic! i'm terrific!" i kept telling myself, "i'll just trick myself into feeling better! this is gonna be easy!" after i finished my smoothie i realized drinking it had worn me out. always stubborn to admit when anything's wrong, i kept trying to remind myself everything would be okay soon. "i'm great! i'm doing fantastic! i'm going to make all my deadlines for homework! i can do this!"

i finally made it to the school library and got to the stairwell- i ALWAYS take the stairs over the elevator. i looked at all of them and all of a sudden i felt like i was in one of those really bad dreams where you're trapped running up or down stairs forever, and it's really a pain-in-the-ass sort of nightmare.

they all are.

"this is bullshit. i'm sick and there's nothing i can do to pretend i'm not."

soup&salad

since i'd moved out, we'd made a point to have dinner together at least once a week, but she'd been gone down to the city i'd left pieces of my heart all over, and so it'd become less frequent than either of us had hoped.

we were splitting something pretty normal: salad and chicken noodle soup. neither of us really had the energy for much creativity, and we were more focused on just existing off of each other. it's been pretty rough for all of us.

"those girls were always so condescending, weren't they..." she said, more an observation than a question. it was true. i'd been mulling over a friend's birthday this weekend and was bouncing my thoughts off of her. i love my friend dearly, but i'd always got the impression a friend of hers looked down at me because i never treated high school like a grand competition. pettiness aside, my friend was the most important thing, so i'd decided to go. screw what other people think.

"yeah, kinda. i don't know. they liked to compare grades in high school and this person was always really shocked when i did well." it was true. how can high school girls be so mean? it's been ages since high school, but i was more than certain some things wouldn't change... why do people hold on to bullshit things like that? life's not a competition, and as the great words of baz luhrmann, "in the end it's only with yourself."

"you know..." i started, "...theres a kid in my theology class that seems pretty shocked when i turn in homework."

"why? you're pretty smart, you just always put yourself down." truth. when i was younger i was shipped around the state so i could take tests and be tested for my "intelligence". i blew everyone out of the goddamned water every time, but it just never seemed important if i wasn't doing anything with it... like helping people or changing the world or something.

"it's my attitude."

"what do you mean? i mean i know, but..."

"i just.... i'd rather people think i don't give a shit than know that there's things in my life i can't handle that are a million times more important." another truth - my life has always been like this. i basically sabotaged my grades my senior year of high school when my best friend was raped... how do you help someone through that? that was the first time i realized life can be (and often is) more important than a gpa. when a friend took his life two years ago..... even though we'd only recently made amends i still dropped out of school for a while to figure out how to deal and be the support for our best friend (there's never a way to "deal" with these things by the way).

and now.... now things are really bad, and i'd really rather everyone just think i have an attitude than know my world is falling apart.

she knew exactly what i was talking about.

more later.

jcs

i love this. i mean seriously, someone looked at this and said "dammit, if there is a heaven it's going to be full of dancing women and judas". i know it's corny but in a lot of regards i think jesus christ superstar is a pretty theologically sound movie.
happy easter:

love,
your favorite theology student

2323232323

happy birthday to me :)

so damn fabulous

brushin my teeth.

small towns

I'll preface this post by noting that a lot has been going on. Most of the days I'm left feeling emotionally exhausted, a little scared, and in a roundabout way... content. I've moved to Seattle... out of the small town I've grown up in, thirty-something miles north-ish of what I'm used to. In the two weeks I've been back up here I've noticed something backwards. When I was down in the south end I was better known to belong to Seattle: I go to school in Seattle, I go out in Seattle, and I generally hang out and kill time in Seattle. Now that I'm back here again I catch myself absentmindedly talking about the south end. Ask me my favorite bands of the moment: Big Sur, Goldfinch, Elk and Boar... Tacoma bands. My favorite venues? I'm in love with the art gallery I started hanging out at on weekends, and even though the Liberty Theater's closed it will forever be my favorite Puyallup venue. The five mile drive around Owen's beach is no longer a drive away since I don't have a car... but I left part of my heart on the beach so I won't miss it as much when I'm away.

It's not that I'm sad or that I think that I'm missing out... it just makes me wonder.... to whom do I belong? I'm waking up in Seattle wondering when the city's going to eat me alive, but I'd wake up in my small town trying to get away before it did the same thing. I feel like I'm stretched between one city and the other, like my heart's skipping beats between cities wondering and wandering along the water.

I know I've chosen to be here, and for me it was for the best. I don't feel like I've given anything up... maybe some conveniences... but at the end of the day I'm still left wondering... where do I belong?

kiss me with that country mouth so plain.

and all the kids in the south end

sing the greatest love song ever written

and carry each others' hearts

close

and they know all the words

and when to sing

and when to weep and

the words mean everything

close to everything worthwhile:

shows

slummed around tacoma this weekend going to shows at the peabody waldorf in tacoma. part of it felt like high school: slipping out late just to be as close to the music as you can so you can't hear anything and forget about everything else in the world that could ever matter. the pictures are worth nothing... somewhere between my drive and the night ending i stopped caring about how the pictures would turn out, and just took them to keep the time standing... but the music was amazing, the company was excellent... it felt like stealing old nights in sumner for a while. it felt like everything and nothing.

birds & batteries played an excellent set. it was all the sort of music to make you forget everything just to move:

and, oh lord, goldfinch holds a place in my heart that will never die. they're the sort of band i know i love, but fall for more and more every time i see them live.

saturday night, summed up in a photo:

a blur of everything. crappy photos, lovely music, good company. it's been one of those weekends that made me forget all the shit going on because the music's been so damn good. elk and boar played the sort of music that reminded me it's not the first time a heart's been broken and there are better and worse things to come... and maybe even a hint that we're not all alone in this mess.

the last band to play last night was too lovely for words.... all of them were, but big sur especially.

i was so caught up in listening i couldn't think of anything but the lovely, moody songs to match all the empty hearts washed up and standing still in tacoma that night.

love.

paper hearts//yellow walls

i never really spoke the words out loud.

i knew it the whole damn time, too. long before he said anything, long before we even really talked about much, i just knew. what do we call that? intuition? reading coffee grounds? attention to detail? nobody had to tell me, and maybe that's what it is about being attached to a physical space: that you leave bits of yourself behind to be picked up by others. half the time i can't make up my damn mind about what i believe, but i know i think there's something to this... i guess it's the only way i can explain how i knew.

maybe it was the brokenness that attracted me. him. all of us. i don’t know, but wouldn’t it happen that zarathustra would point out that it's our weakness to give attention to pain... maybe that’s what drew me. maybe it's what drew everyone else in, too, you know? that need to repair whatever they sensed needed repairing... that desire to gaze after what is broken.

it's the same feeling you get when you slow down to look at a car accident, or when you can’t help but hope the waves will wash over all the tracks in the sand.

anyway.

i remember the night he told me. i was looking for company... really i was looking for anywhere to go but home, and i knew (by intuition or by habit) that someone would still be around. i swung by and we closed the place down: we cleaned and scrubbed and wiped down anything and everything... maybe just to try and clean the heavy weight the place had held. i drank to remember. he drank to forget. i could feel it coming a mile away, and i figured i was finally going to hear the entire thing beginning to end.

it was the heart.

it always is though, isn’t it?

it took everything not to drag out from him the words i already knew were coming. patience is not my virtue when i already know the answer, but it wasn't my story to tell. i don’t really know how i knew. it wasn’t intuition but it wasn’t spelled our across the peeling linoleum floor, either. the words slipped out, first quietly and then...

what the what

vendetta red's having a reunion show at el corazon (of course, if you know better it will always be the graceland).
this is the most important thing right now.

"don't forget me"

"try not to forget me, okay," he said. how could i? i remember most of my classmates names from third and fourth grade, and could probably remember half of them from kindergarden if i gave it a good shot. besides, he'd worked pretty hard to argue against the professor the entire quarter while i'd basically done the opposite and tried to understand exactly where the professor was coming from. we were polar opposites, that much had been made clear over the quarter... then again...

"it sucks i'm leaving the day we finally meet, doesn't it?"

well. we'd actually met three months prior, but we'd only just had six hours worth of conversation to make up for lost time. i'd given up looking for anything, and for some reason as soon as i'd let go, all the worthwhile things were falling into my visual realm of.... whatever you want to call it. of course. as soon as i'd thought i had no more heart to give, i realized it had only been kept armored inside a steel dinosaur trap...

that would probably not open for a long time.

or a long while.

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i watched the teens last night.

the ones i can't help but return to every weekend.

if my heart was left anywhere, it was somewhere between the south narthex and the cafeteria. i watched them all at once: the flirting, the giggling, the chasing, the awkward conversations, the hand-holding, the hugging... all that fun stuff. i remembered when a high-school break up was the absolute most devastating thing in the entire world. i remembered when everything was absolute. that's what i like about going back to volunteer with them: they remind me that things don't have to be so grey and wishy-washy. things can be defined if i let them be what they are.

more later i guess.

take me there

it was a long night of everything at once.

the greatest christmas party we'd ever had kept happening, and then just as suddenly (though not soon at all, for it had had a good eight hour run), everything began to slow down but it never really stopped.

he woke up a few hours later in a panic, and i wasn't really sure if i'd ever really fallen asleep to begin with. she'd just fallen asleep, and was far enough away from me that i wasn't sure what to do.

you know.... how you can always think a little clearer when your best friend's closer to you.

he told me he'd had a nightmare of the world ending and buildings burning, and all the three months of talking about philosophy had me wondering if i had anything to do with it. how hypersensitive are we, anyway? where'd our senses go? was i just over-thinking everything? i was too tired to continue wondering if anything meant anything at all, and i still wasn't sure if i had fallen asleep anyway, so i did what any good friend would do and i patted his forehead and told him it was going to be okay.

and then i wished she was awake, too, so that maybe she could pat my forehead and tell me everything was going to be okay as well. but she was asleep, and the night always brings more fears and doubts than it ought to.

and then i thought of all the places i wanted to go.

not just the following day, not even in a few weeks.

all of a sudden i wanted to stand up and run and go to all the places i'd captured in my heart, but then i wondered if i even had one at all, or maybe if i'd given it away one too many times and was left with absolutely nothing.

do i have to build myself a new heart?

i was thinking too much.

maybe i still am.

all i knew was that i wanted to run somewhere right the hell then. i sat up and saw the moonlight peeking through the blinds: all the city was asleep.

maybe the city won't take me back, but everywhere else will welcome me: