bird by bird

... ________________________________________________________ People are continually leaving my life before I'm ready to let them go. Please stay. _______________________________________________________ ...

Sometimes (what am I saying?, ALL the time) other people can say things better than I can.. These are some examples from Anne Lamott: "It's so different having a living father who loves you, even someone complex and imperfect. After your father dies, defeat becomes pretty defeating. When he's still alive, there are set backs and heartbreak, but you're still the apple of someone's eye" (225). "And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old." "I don't know why life isn't constructed to be seamless and safe, why we make such glaring mistakes, things fall so short of our expectations, and our hearts get broken and our kids do scary things and our parents get old and don't always remember to put pants on before they go out from a stroll. I don't know why it's not more like it is in the movies, why things don't come out neatly and l

Sometimes I just want to cut hair. In class, I constantly find myself not paying attention to discussions about the homoerotic subjectivity of Walt Whitman or the aesthetic principles of Plato, but instead, my attention goes to the girl with straggly brownish/grayish hair that sits in the second row. All I want to do it cut it! I want to straighten it, give her some highlights, at least cover the gray. Please don't judge me if after I finish my MA in English, I go to beauty school and spend the rest of my life standing for 10 hours a day gossiping and styling hair. I think it may be my true calling.