before :: after

for the first time in God only knows how long, i've got the entire house to myself. i'm taking advantage of this decadent privacy to sit, door open, on my bed, sweaty in a sportsbra and oversized mens' pants.

you know how sometimes you seem to attach albums or songs or playlists to a certain time period in your life? i'd call freshman year a combination of the garden state soundtrack, joseph arthur "honey and the moon", david gray "please forgive me" and "this year's love",

this summer is third eye blind's album, blue. and this summer's bringing a lot of things to my attention, namely

the fact that every year older i get, i become more aware of how little i know and how vast the rest of the world is,

that you need to lower your expectations more than you ever anticipated as a naive middle- or highschooler,

as intuitive as you might be, you should never never give one hundred percent credibility to the behavior you think you're reading in other people,

at this point in my life, though in ten or fifteen years this will probably change, the nicest and most patient, moral, agreeable male is not necessarily the one who will make me happy/-iest, or who i will wind up being most attracted to, and he will not be what i need, because at eighteen, i do not need a husband,

but, by the same token, boys that may or may not have had on and off crushes on you since 2002 that never materialized are just pleasant distractions and capricious whims of low self-esteem and needs to bolster the ego with bouts of spiratic flirting and sexual innuendo,

love, or mutual affection, is either the most complicated concept to ever come into existence, or it's as simple as breathing. i think, perhaps, it

starts out complicated, when you're falling, or maybe it's simple when you're attracted, and then it gets difficult in working out specifics, in getting to know each other, and when you're sitting on a porch at the respective ages of 79 and 83, rocking back and forth in white wicker chairs sipping lemonade with Metamucil mixed in, through a straw and your dentures, it's effortless. habitual. ingrained.

can loving a person become ingrained in you after time? we have opposable thumbs, feelings, and cable tv, meatless meatballs... but can we teach ourselves to hope against hoping, to forget against our photographic memories? to put our desires on a leash and lead them away from where they're headstrongly heading?

i'm speculating.