because no one ever thinks that the gates of heaven would have any graffiti at all.

i need to stop reading the papers. the bp oil spill is all i ever see, and it is sending me to very dark places.

i was reading an article the other day on the animals that the spill has/will kill and a thought struck me: we can go no further. the human race has always gone up up up, exponentially. but now, we can only go down. we may continue to advance technologically, but this spill is going to be the end of us. there is much too much oil in the water now for any cleanup efforts to even make a dent in it for a very long time. animal species may even be wiped out completely, and once the balance is thrown off, we will all tumble down that slippery slope with no chance of redemption.

this thought scares me. the fact that we are digging our own graves scares me.

the fact that, as of day, the end has begun, scares me.

i want to own a teahouse. i want, more specifically, to own a teahouse in seattle.

yet everyone around me seems bent on getting me to “settle for what i can get”. my father, for instance, thinks i should get a job with the local engineering corporation and spend the rest of my life hunched over  a computer program, designing boats for people much richer than i. while i understand that there is very good money to be made in this business, it is not what i want to do and therefore i refuse to spend the rest of my life doing it.

i imagine myself in an old bed-and-breakfast on a sloping seattle street, serving tea until my feet are numb and i can do no more but crawl home to my loft and collapse into sleep. so why this “do what you hate as long as it makes you money” mentality? does anyone else out there in cyberspace think that life is way, waaaay, too short to waste it in some miserable job?

or am i alone in this free-spirited, wild, kooky way of thinking? does everyone else content themselves with hellish careers just because, hey, at least it pays well? i do certainly understand the need to keep food on the table and all that, but there are certain limits to set.

i will never, ever, spend my life in a job that leaves me a soulless, jaded husk of the lively person i once was, simply because i need the money. i, right here and right now, pledge to only do what i love because i would rather live broke and doing something that brings me to life, than rich and unfulfilled.

so who’s with me?

i have the sudden and extreme urge to go to confession. i’m not even catholic. seriously, i’m buddhist. where did this random urge for being absolved of my sins come from?

i don’t even think of myself as a sinner. i like to think that, thus far, i have not led a life in the darkness, that i have even done some good things in this world. so i cannot help but wonder if someone somewhere is trying to tell me something. is the end of days fast approaching? should i repent before we die by fire and ice? i would like to think that we all have a few more years on this planet, but the relentless, nagging thought that maybe quetzalcoatl will return in 2012 and wreak mayhem and havoc upon us puny mortals.

so perhaps it is high time i had some sort of confession. something a little more potent than a five hour long gal pal bitching session about how much i dislike backstabbers (i know, we all do) and how hot jake gyllenhaal is. or something of the like.

or maybe, i just need to confess to the boundless black hole of cyberspace to feel cleansed. so here, few and dearly adored readers, is my confession:

i killed a man in reno… just to watch him die.

(don’t worry, i’m just kidding.)

last night, i had a dream about hatching eggs. this is a new dream theme for me; i usually dream of scattered things that i can’t remember in the morning.

but, last night, i dreamt that i found all these tiny, beautiful eggs buried in damp beach sand, between two large boulders. and, as i watched them, i saw that the chicks inside were trying to hatch, but couldn’t. for some reason, my dreams work mysteriously, and answer my questions before i ask them. so i knew, without a doubt, that the chicks could not hatch because they were too cold.

and here is the strange thing. as soon as i realized they were too cold, i could not stand to leave them. it was like their pitiful attempts were breaking my heart a thousand ways. so i but my hands around the eggshells till they were warm enough to hatch.

when i woke up, i was struck by the weirdness of the situation and my solution to the problem (which would, of course, never work in reality). so, i hopped onto my neighbor’s wifi signal and googled my dream.

the dream dictionary told me that hatching means delayed success, but this is not what i think my dream signifies. so, i’m going to tell you a secret. i think my dream means i want a baby. or rather, that is certainly what it felt like when i woke up. i opened my eyes and my hands were on my stomach and i was thinking “this is no morning to feel this empty.”

and now, as i go through my day, i keep thinking that and i keep remembering how sad i was when i thought those baby birds were going to die. its like suddenly my internal maternal instinct dial has been turned up to high. i mean, i baked cookies today, for pete’s sake!

and then, i remind myself that i am only 15. and that teen pregnancy is not good. and that i have my whole life ahead of me to have children. and that someday, i am sure, i will.

ephemeral. i hate that word. and i love that word.

it is, most likely, my favorite word in the english language. soft, it rolls off the tongue and always reminds me of spiderwebs and misty beaches in the morning.

but it’s meaning, how it’s meaning is cruel and cold to us poets. webster’s has only this to say about it: “ephemeral (ih-fem-er-uhl), adjective. means: lasting a very short time.“

and that is that. how can such a beautiful collection of letters have such an utterly desolate meaning? what kind of world is this when there are ephemeral things?

it breaks my heart that nothing lasts forever. and this word only reminds me of that fact. it is simply a painful word to know. and a painful word to understand.