bird by bird

I saw this band perform on Sunday night at the Chautauqua Auditorium and I felt both full and empty for the whole 4 minutes and 18 seconds they played this song. I breathed slowly and blinked quickly through my favorite line, "But a life without you could never steal me now." I think of all the times I've thought that, and I wonder how many more times I will.

Alt Title: "I'm Pushing Past My Post Birthday Writer's Block" I listened to Hillary Clinton narrate her audio book, "What Happened," and I felt both sorrow and strength in her words. While standing at a sink of dirty dishes with purple rubber gloves scrubbing coffee cups, I ugly cried when she detailed her crippling disappointment about how things turned out. I'm now buying this book for every girlfriend who's ever been dumped. We all want to understand what happened. Hearing Hillary was healing. I traveled to Mexico City with my best travel girl, CH for an impromptu long weekend that had been previously postponed by the 7.1 magnitude earthquake in September. I never knew that I'd be so happy to be in a place that I had previously no interest in visiting. I just had no idea! I'm so glad CH brought me there and fed me tacos and made me "jaja" for four days straight. Sometime we should go somewhere other than Mexico, but on the ot

 Alt Title: "I'm having Birthday Post Writer's Block"

Last night while walking back from King Soopers with two canvas totes full of groceries (containing both a watermelon and a jar of pickles-poor planning on my part), this song came through my headphones. Though I've heard it possibly thousands of times in the past 11 years that I've been a Brandi Carlile fan, I realized that the meaning of the song has changed. And so have I.  The lyrics, "All of these lines across my face / Tell you the story of who I am" were a little lost on the 21-year-old version of me, but hearing them yesterday revealed what I had missed before. I guess aging will do that to you. Now I hear the song as a tribute to the way that life effects us, both our skin and what's beneath it. So today on the eve of my 32nd birthday, I'm going to try to see my imperfections, the visible signs of wear and tear on my face, as parts of my story. My laugh lines are commas, my crows feet question marks, my gray hairs the ellipses.  All of