From "Extraordinary Means" by Robyn Schneider

Written on snippets of scratch paper, to ponder on. The most interesting part is pondering the reason I felt compelled to write down these parts. I think I'm working hard on finding meaning in my own existence.

No one kept in touch, they just kept up. And then, when they couldn't keep up anymore, they forgot. (p. 170)

Yes, we'll party like nameless minor characters in a novel about someone else. (Sadie, p. 246, about Great Gatsby)

We mourn the future because it's easier than admitting that we're miserable in the present. (Lane, p. 249)

Haven't you ever thought about it? What you want to leave behind, and what you don't? (p. 261)

It's strange how we can lose things that are still right there. How a barrier can go up at any moment, trapping you on the other side, keeping you from what you want. How the things that hurt the most are the things we once had. (p. 276) 

Being temporary doesn't make something matter any less, because the point isn't for how long, the point is that it happened. (p. 284)

I was tired of being an empty box, of maintaining a checklist instead of a passion, of having skipped so many rites of passage that were lost to me now.

We all reach for whatever we think is going to dull the pain, and sometimes we don't even want whatever it is, we just want not to be miserable, you know. 

I really did enjoy this novel, particularly the humor of the characters. The medical aspect of it (XDR-TB) was also very compelling and emotionally moving to me. Prior to this book I finished Allegiant, and currently I'm reading Wink Poppy Midnight. All three books have the multiple-character first person format, and so far, Extraordinary Means felt the most natural and easy to follow. Granted, I'm just getting into Wink Poppy Midnight so I feel like the flow will pick up as I keep reading. Allegiant was difficult to get through from the get-go and I only truly appreciated the switching perspectives at the very end  -- I couldn't feel connected to the male voice at all, after hearing the female voice for the previous two books.

Also, while I'm cleaning out papers with quotes on them, here's a few more I found from Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. They have a completely different feeling:

If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages. (p. 80)

It's so egalitarian it's beyond democracy. (p. 87)

And some things from Divergent, I guess:

I don't need them -- but do I want them? Every tattoo I got with them is a mark of their friendship, and almost everytime I have laughed in this dark place was because of them. I don't want to lose them. But I feel like I have already. (p. 275) 

Believe in the ordinary acts of bravery. (Dauntless)

Finally, here's that reminder to myself to someday watch, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness about Hayao Miyazaki.

What the receipts remind me

From El Paso and Las Cruces, snippets of the week spent there for MTNA.

Shot glasses and animal keychains, NMSU memorabilia in maroon and black. A captain crunch frappe from the Barnes & Nobles/University Bookstore, an acutely retail feeling in a quiet college town. Walking past frat houses on flat streets, not a student in sight.

Extra-large egg shakers from the zoo, textured with colorful, raised designs, one for each sister. The brisk winter air, the scrawny animals slinking to the corners of their pens, the closed Dippin' Dots cart. Empty walkways, like the zoo was ours and ours alone to enjoy. Sitting together on carved benches and statues of animals of all types. Our stupid faces squeezed everywhere: from meercats and groundhog peekholes, to the Christmas toyland cutouts at the mall, a bright, sunny bus ride away.

My first purchase from Express: a slightly worn denim jacket, slightly too small, but too cute and too on sale to pass up. Tyler picked himself a blue tie. Then, later, in the hotel room, Shawn, shrugging it on, much to tight and binding to his frame, a goofy image not to be forgotten. Playing mau in the dim light on the round table in the room, and my bed, a nest of blanket and pillows in the corner of the room.

An $8 ride up Wyler Aerial Tramway. The perfectly cool and clear skies, the sun that lent a glow to the dry Texan slopes speckled with bushes, and the stretching, endlessly stretching, expanse of land. Shawn, with his fear of heights, and Ryan, with his blatant disregard of them, forever confident and brave and proud within himself. Gold and silver pencils, two feet long,

Chachi's on the final night, and Ryan's stomach of unrest that followed. No qualms, sipped perfect horchata, walking distance from our hotel, bundled in the cool night air.

Of course, there are things that they can't remind me of: the hours on the plane, sandwiched between Tyler and Shawn playing Pokemon X in earnest, the moments waiting in the airport as the new year chimed in. The hours together, walking and riding and eating and practicing, tears and smiles and laughs and all.

2014. I am so very fond of these memories.

Monday, July 18, 2016

Today is a day that felt like a Sunday, slow and sweltering with the summer heat. I woke up at a reasonable hour feeling sticky from the storm the night before. The reasonable rise was only to bring my car to the shop to repair the damages from the littler fender bender I'd gotten into a week or two ago.

Traffic on the H3 was gloriously speedy to the point that I forgot that it was Monday, a day where people slog through crowded cars to get to their equally crowded workspaces. Leaving my car in the lush beauty of the Windward side was far from a gloomy experience. I'm sure the next eight days will be its restorative vacation.

Time ticked even slower back home as I trapped myself in my room without a fan, or a breeze, to accommodate the space necessitated by Mariah and her elementary school friends. Their laughs were so earnest and so loud, I wondered if I would've been that joyful with the friends I had then. It crossed my mind that it may be interesting to reconnect with them, but honestly, what would be the point? Our lives took separate ways long before and it would only be an act of earnest curiosity that would bring us back into each other's lives again for more than a passing conversation, much less an afternoon together.

I found it within myself to dig into that Express bag full of unsorted receipts. I'd been reluctant to touch them; I didn't want to go through the work of inputting them into my transaction spreadsheets. The beauty of these sheets, though, is that they only start in January of this year. I was pleasantly surprised to find receipts from December of 2015, which I tossed after a quick glance if it wasn't for a major purchase. (Thankfully, but embarrassingly, a lot of my receipts were for food). However, when I found a bag of receipts from 2013-2014, I was taken aback. A little afraid, even.

In the haunting way that receipts can be, they chronicled just a small part of my final year as an undergraduate. They are parts of that final semester leading up to graduation, when I didn't drive myself places but took the bus to eat instead, when I still went on adventures with Megan and Cheyenne after classes, when I took naps in my dorm with the setting sun leaking between downtown Honolulu onto the black and green and brown and white that predominated my UHM experience. My dinners were with friends or alone, the meal decided by me. Compare that to now, in which dinner with family is the norm and when leaving them feels like a betrayal.

I threw away those receipts save for the one for textbook purchases. They remind me too much of the person I used to be, left behind, let slip away. Time really does fly... whether or not you're having fun. I can't tell if, since graduation, I've not been having enough fun or just too much of it.

Whichever it is, I made a little progress today letting go of some of the clutter of the past. I'm still, as always, trying to get a grip on who I am in the present. Even that's changed in the course of these few summer months. Here's to that continuous destruction and reconstruction of self, a cycle of rebirth through simply being that repeats on every level of our existence, from our thoughts down to the cells that create us.