Champagne is definitely in order during your Christmas visit! I couldn't be happier...
hearing about your engagement plans and I will be very eager to see "the ring". I know it will be as special as the two designers.

With love, mum

So, out of the blue this myspace thing turns up a long lost girlfriend of mine from say 4 lives ago, and it is a miraculous thing and all of that.

With her visit emerges the only known existing piece of videography from my childhood. This video includes never-before-seen-footage of her 13th birthday party, and our commencement exercises from 8th grade at Saint Eugene's Catholic grade school in Oklahoma City. During the balloon studded event, an awards ceremony occurs which I have blocked completely from my memory...but sitting up on the sofa I am intrigued.

They say that the events that occur in your life make patterns that most people don't even realize until their very death when it all suddenly makes sense. I have wondered about these patterns ever so casually off and on and all around the transitions of my life. The meaning. What were the talents and experiences of my youth that prepared me for the human being I am to realize?

So, I put a little weight on this award- being presented to me almost for the second time in my life. I built it up in those few minutes on the couch as a 'life-defining moment' of the stuff epiphanies are made out of. Epiphanies with which little light bulbs and nimbuses and white doves are about. But when Mrs. Russell called out my name- Hollie and I sat up in our seats- and she announced me as the class' 'Most improved student'.

The word 'devestated' comes to mind.

Silence.
'Were you making bad grades before or something?' Hollie asked trying to make the best of it.

No, I wasn't making bad grades. I didn't overcome any major academic, personal, or social hurdle that warranted such a sappy, lame, mediocre award. An award for the girl that they couldn't dream up any other award for.
Stewing today in my bitter mediocrity... -jane.

No one has touched the house in months. By 'touched', I mean improved. And so the conversation turns again to wild thoughts of escape, followed then by soothing sentimentality, turning then to furious rage toward the hick city council, then reverting back to inspired home improvements, and storming over that into utter exhaustion, to dreaming of a perfect future here, or there, or someother place.

I woke up this morning, and a tree had fallen down in the night. I'm pissed. I marched up to it, and looked at it square in the...it was oozing from it chipping trunk. Getting the arborist to settle this death once and for all because I'm tired of this sinking stomach, this concious, this responsibility I'm failing.