Paris, Demetrius, George

A Letter to a friend:

Dear Paris, Demetrius, George--

Have you ever been in distress? I have.. And I'm in distress right now. And it's your fault. But I'm not mad at you for that. I'm mad at you for leaving, because you had no right to let that happen.

I was banking on you living. I was so ready to see you again, it wasn't even funny.

I'm also mad at that stupid car. The stupid car that you broke, and the stupid car that broke you. I used to stick my head out of the sunroof of that car while we listened to Backstreet Boys. Such pathetic music my friend--but I secretly enjoyed myself.

Be gentle, sky, and let me rest –
These bones are worn – they lack the zest
Of flesh in life – they’re marrowless! –
Their arid surface, nakedness! –
Betrayed in death; no sheen of red
From coursing blood; and blue was shed
Upon the fading out of eyes
That cased the world and gave disguise
To what my deepest thoughts had been –
But now I’m done with all I’ve seen.

Mark R Slaughter

You always made ridiculous jokes. When you would smack your head against the stool and hit the ground, it always seemed so real. And it was a joke. This isn't funny.

I guess I was just banking on your getting better. That's the assumption, isn't it? When someone pulls through you expect them to just get better. I suppose it gave us longer to say goodbye.

Except I didn't get to say goodbye.

Anything to make you smile
You are the ever-living ghost of what once was
I never want to hear you say
That you'd be better off
Or you liked it that way

Band of Horses

It rained today. And if I looked at my dorms I thought I was back home again, even for a short time. It made me feel safe. When I looked at campus, the mountains disoriented me. But still. The rain was pretty nice.

I know Gillian misses you. Which makes me really sad for her. She doesn't cry that often, but when she does, it destroys me. Remember those jerks who made fun of her once? I was livid. And I know everyone had her back on that one.

You're one of those friends that sometimes I got annoyed with. I'm not gonna lie about that, but that wasn't what mattered.
OH. But you know what really sucks? I'm in a functional relationship (crazy, right?) And you never got to meet him. But he's been a great help actually. I couldn't stop crying, and he made me feel better. You know his friend died when someone burglarized his home. So he knows.

Remember the crazy trips to Shari's when Mike yelled at us? And who else did that? I just know those were the best.

And you gave me your blanket on halloween once, because I was too cold to handle life. And lynelle broke a fence. But I also never gave you your blanket back.

Death is weird. It never actually feels all that real until you recognize the absence of that person. Because I'm here, I can't really feel that you're gone. I honetsly keep thinking you'll still be hanging around the high school, like usual. Creep.

I haven't recognized your absence yet. Maybe it won't happen for a while. I tried to last night, so that maybe I would feel better. All it did was overwhelm me. I couldn't stop crying. Then Bekah gave me a snickers bar. And I still didn't feel better.

Remember when you drove us to Ryan's show cause I had such a big stupid crush on him? I vowed never to let you drive my car again because I hated the way you drove
I hate the way you drive even more now.

"The key here, I think, is to not think of death as an end. But... but... think of it more as a very effective way of cutting down on your expenses"

Love and Death

Wow I'm freaking hilarious. Aren't I?

anyways....

I miss you. A lot. well that's a lie.
I'm not at home
so I don't miss you
Not quite yet
But when I come home, it'll be a storm
a storm of emotion and pain

but also..
I know exactly where you are. you're in that big magical place that I like to call Heaven. And someday, I'll see you
but not for a while
cause I personally plan on living a very long time buddy boy

You know that scene at the end of Romeo and Juliet? That's not real life. You won't accidentally hit me with a sword, mike won't kiss me, I won't fumble to find the retractable dagger. I won't die. I'm still here. I'm just chilling out, observing all that you left behind. Good one.

Well, I'm sitting on my bed, watching Bekah study, and watching Diane read. I just watched a funny movie, and I laughed. But when the movie ended, I got sad again. And I just sat there for a long while, scrolling through your photos.

Man, when I see you, I'm going to kick your butt, cause this wasn't funny.

Love, Juliet, Hermia, Myrtle

PS: Don't expect me to like the RIP Tyler Flowers fbook page. I don't do RIP. It makes me think of halloween. Which is ridiculous, and cheesey. How about I just say miss you tylee??

 Tyler Flowers

June 21, 1993-October 5th 2011

Fix You

Sometimes you want to fix people but you can't.

Poor Boy



Photos courtesy of Carson Schafer

Outfit details:

Hat-gifted

Shirt-Papaya

Necklace-Icing

Jeggings-Papaya

Sandals-Target

Boyfriend is sick. Poor kid, he's got a cold. I hate getting sick, and so I bought him Day-Quil. Being sick with a cold, especially during the summer, is awful. All you want is to feel cozy and bundled up, with soup and a sweater, and all other sorts of loveliness. But during the summer, or at least, the hot part of September, your chances of getting to be cozy are pretty slim. So I feel extra bad for the guy. If it was winter, or fall, when colds are supposed to happen, I would tell him to sleep,and watch movies, and just feel better. As is, there's nothing that can make him feel all that great. Unfortunately.

He's such a sweet guy though. I told him I wanted to go to homecoming a while ago, and he was none too happy about it. But randomly today he asked me if we were still going. And I told him that I had changed my mind since I knew he didn't want to go. But then he told me he wanted to go. And that we would have fun. Even though he hates dancing. So it will be wonderful, if I don't have work :)

Oh gosh, today at work, my assistant manager pierced a four year olds ears. And she literally screamed for an hour. I didn't know what to do about it. At first I wanted to cry too, cause it made me sad, but then I just wanted to tear my hair out. Ridiculous. Anyway, I got to spend a lot of time with my friend Brittni, who works at Chick-Fil-A. We don't get to see each other a lot, and today we rode home from work together, and that southern belle bought me a grilled cheese sandwich :) Gotta love a girl who buys me grilled cheese. Mama loves her some good ol' grilled cheese.

Love, Sarai

Thanks to Carson for the fabulous pictures :)

October Leaves

Yesterday I went for a nice sunday walk with my parents along the waterfront and saw my first red leaves of the season :) Its finally started to feel like the usual rainy northwest fall that i'm used to instead of random 80 degree weather at the end of September! What was up with that?! 

Last week I got fed up with this summer weather business and made some nice fall Oatmeal Cranberry White Chocolate Chunk cookies.

Freaking delicious! And now that fall is here I don't have to create my own fall by baking constantly.

Peace lovelies

-Nancy

Something Real

By: K'Naan

MOGADISHU, Somalia

ONE has to be careful about stories. Especially true ones. When a story is told the first time, it can find a place in the listener’s heart. If the same story is told over and over, it becomes less like a presence in that chest and more like an X-ray of it.

The beating heart of my story is this: I was born in Mogadishu, Somalia. I had a brief but beautiful childhood filled with poetry from renowned relatives. Then came a bloody end to it, a lesson in life as a Somali: death approaching from the distance, walking into our lives in an experienced stroll.

At 12 years old, I lost three of the boys I grew up with in one burst of machine-gun fire — one pull from the misinformed finger of a boy probably not much older than we were.

But I was also unusually lucky. The bullets hit everyone but me.

Luck follows me through this story; so does my luckless homeland. A few harrowing months later, I found myself on the last commercial flight to leave Somalia before war closed in on the airport. And over the years, fortune turned me into Somalia’s loudest musical voice in the Western Hemisphere.

Meanwhile, my country festered, declining more and more. When I went on a tour of 86 countries last year, I could not perform in the one that mattered most to me. And when my song “Wavin’ Flag” became the theme song for the World Cup that year, the kids back home were not allowed to listen to it on the airwaves. Whatever melodious beauty I found, living in the spotlight, my country produced an opposing harmony in shadows, and the world hardly noticed. But I could still hear it.

And now this terrible year: The worst famine in decades pillages the flesh of the already wounded in Somalia. And the world’s collective humanitarian response has been a defeated shrug. If ever there was a best and worst time to return home, it was now.

So, 20 summers after I left as a child, I found myself on my way back to Somalia with some concerned friends and colleagues. I hoped that my presence would let me shine a light into this darkness. Maybe spare even one life, a life equal to mine, from indifferently wasting away. But I am no statesman, nor a soldier. Just a man made fortunate by the power of the spotlight. And to save someone’s life I am willing to spend some of that capricious currency called celebrity.

We had been told that Mogadishu was still among the most dangerous cities on the planet. So it was quiet on the 15-seat plane from Nairobi. We told nervous jokes at first, then looked to defuse the tension. The one book I had brought was Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast.” I reached a chapter titled “Hunger Was Good Discipline” and stopped. That idea needed some contemplation. The very thing driving so many from their homes in Somalia was drawing me back there. I read on. Hemingway felt that paintings were more beautiful when he was “belly-empty, hollow-hungry.” But he was not speaking of the brutal and criminally organized hunger of East Africa. His hunger was beautiful. It made something of you. The one I was heading into only made ashes of you.

By now, the ride was bumpy. We were flying low, so I could see Baraawe and Merca, beauties of coastal towns that I had always dreamed of visiting. The pilot joked that he would try to fly low enough for my sightseeing, but high enough to avoid the rocket-propelled grenades.

FOR miles along that coast, all you see are paint-like blue water, beautiful sand dunes eroding, and an abandoned effort to cap them with concrete. Everything about Somalia feels like abandonment. The buildings, the peace initiatives, the hopes and dreams of greatness for a nation.

With the ocean to our backs, our wheels touch down in Mogadishu, at the airport I left 20 years before to the surround-sound of heavy artillery pounding the devil’s rhythm. Now there is an eerie calm. We clear immigration, passing citizens with AK-47’s slung over their shoulders.

It’s not a small task to be safe in Mogadishu. So we keep our arrival a secret until after we ride from the airport to the city, a ride on which they say life expectancy is about 17 minutes if you don’t have the kind of security that has been arranged for me.

Over breakfast at a “safe house,” I update my sense of taste with kidney and anjera (a bread), and a perfectly cooled grapefruit drink. Then we journey onto the city streets. It’s the most aesthetically contradictory place on earth — a paradise of paradox. The old Italian and locally inspired architecture is colored by American and Russian artillery paint. Everything stands proudly lopsided.

And then come the makeshift camps set up for the many hungering displaced Somalis. They are the reason I am here. If my voice was an instrument, then I needed it to be an amplifier this time. If my light was true, then I needed it to show its face here, where it counts. Nothing I have ever sung will matter much if I can’t be the mouth of the silenced. But will the world have ears for them, too?

I find the homeless Somalis’ arms open, waiting for the outside world and hoping for a second chance into its fenced heart. I meet a young woman watching over her dying mother, who has been struck by the bullet of famine. The daughter tells me about the journey to Mogadishu — a 200-mile trek across arid, parched land, with adults huddling around children to protect them first. This mother refused to eat her own food in order to feed abandoned children they had picked up along the way. And now she was dying because of that.

The final and most devastating stop for me was Banadir Hospital, where I was born. The doctors are like hostages of hopelessness, surrounded and outnumbered. Mothers hum lullabies holding the skeletal heads of their children. It seems eyes are the only ornament left of their beautiful faces; eyes like lanterns holding out a glimmer of faint hope. Volunteers are doing jobs they aren’t qualified for. The wards are over-crowded, mixing gun wound, malnutrition and cholera patients.

Death is in every corner of this place. It’s lying on the mattresses holding the tiny wrists of half-sleeping children. It’s near the exposed breasts of girls turned mothers too soon. It folds in the cots, all-knowing and silent; its mournful wind swells the black sheets. Here, each life ends sadly, too suddenly and casually to be memorialized.

In this somber and embittered forgotten place, at least they were happy to see I had come.

The original article is found here

Into the Storm

 In a book that I read a while ago this artist asked "when you look at this what do you see? [all you saw was the Babe with his back to the camera] His face." When I see this photo, I see her face. Not as being afraid of the storm but determined to get through it. It's a simple trick of the artist to make you feel without actually having to see what they want you to see. 

I love this photo because I feel like i've just been in this crazy whirlwind this past month but i'm getting through it. I just keep moving forward. 

I guess i'll just let you guys in on the secret. Crazy things happened so Portland State University didn't happen. Now BYU-Idaho is happening. But not until January so moving to Seattle for a bit in the next few weeks might happen. Bascially I graduated high school, went to Chile and had this awesome experience and then my whole life changed. But, it's all for the better :)

-Nancy

I'm Your Person



My entire life (I'm counting my whole life from the age of three) I've had a best friend. I wouldn't say that we've actually been best friends those entire fifteen years, but I'd say pretty much a large portion of it we were. I've known Nancy five sixths of my whole life. That's a long time. You don't know someone that long and not learn everything there is to know about them.

I know that Nancy feels sick when she drinks milk, but she sometimes does anyway

I know that she will spend hours making a delicious dessert, because it's so worth it

I know that for her, usually getting ready is more fun than the actual event

I know that she likes to touch faces, and has had her dinosaur quillow her whole life

I know that she loves aesthetics. Especially buildings

She has great running form, and she's got a rocking body, cause we're smokin' hot wives ;)

She hates thrifting, but respects those of us who can

She's funny (at least to me), she thinks I'm funny too (I honestly didn't know that was possible), and she can spiritually uplift me any time, with just a wonderful text.

I explained to her a while ago that I know we'll be best friends forever because we try so hard to always help the other back onto the right path if we ever stray. Even if she's struggling, Nancy never ever gives me advice that would lead me to make wrong choices.

And also, we're just obnoxiously close. We have the little telepathy thing going on, where we just happen to know what the other is thinking, anytime. Never play pictionary with us. It's brutal.

Anyway, I miss her. I haven't seen her in a while and it sucks to know that we won't see each other for a few more months. I can talk to boyfriend, and all my friends here, but when you need your number one best friend, your future maid of honor, your piano (code name, don't worry about it), sometimes you just need that sexy little freak and no one else.

I think I'll go write her a letter.

Also, the video of Cristina and Meredith is definitely Nancy and I. She's Cristina, and I'm Meredith. And she is SO my person.

Love, Sarai