My roommate Hannah came back from a meditation retreat on Monday with a present for me. It was a book written by this smiley aging lesbian-type (I am judging her based on her author picture) named Cheri Huber titled, "Regardless of What You Were Taught to Believe, There Is Nothing Wrong With You." It really looks like one of those books you buy at a gas station. You know, the ones that are called "A Sister Is A Sneeze From God," or whatever. There's a monarch butterfly on the cover, and all the titling is in a font that can only be described as an unfortunate knock-off of Comic Sans. 

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I am not outdoorsy. Don’t get me wrong, I like the outdoors. I see a river and appreciate its rivery-ness. Sometimes I say sentences like, “Wow. Aren’t trees something? They are so big and full of leaves!” And I feel very profound about it. I often exercise the common white person trope of making other people feel bad about not going outside. (“It’s such a beautiful day! What are you doing cooped up in this house when you could be out there in the sun?”)

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Yesterday started out hard. I won't go into detail here -- mostly because I am pretty sure that 90 percent of my blog is some kind of descriptive variation on "I'm feeling sad" -- but just know that I was in a bad mood. 

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I met Leah in an elevator. I'd seen her picture in the paper Teach for America Look Book (you know, just to make the already-sketchy organization a little more like a dating website), and she had been impossible to forget. Most of the TFA Corps members in the book (self included) looked like photocopied images of each other: toothy, buttoned down, and with an expression that somehow managed to say, "I gave the speech at my college graduation. What have YOU ever done?" Leah had chosen a picture where you could see her tattoos. She was wearing a cupcake-themed apron and holding a tray of baked goods, while she stuck out her tongue like she was on the cover of a Bikini Kill poster. So I was obsessed with her before I even met her. 

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Spring technically started on March 20, but there have been plenty of cold days since then. There were several nights in the interim between March 20 and now where I had to turn on the electric blanket (like an old person), and whine over the steadfast cruelty of the universe for being so, so cold. Now, finally, I can whine just as loudly that it is so, so hot and muggy. At last. In New Orleans, it is spring. 

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Early-on in our travels across Laurel, I got lost. That's normal: I have absolutely no sense of direction whatsoever. Just, none. Once I was traveling from New Orleans to Tennessee and I ended up in Texas. On the train going back to Laurel, I got lost on my way from the observation car back to my seat. (Like, actually lost. Like, I had to talk to someone about it, because I could not figure out how to get back to my seat.) Not only am I bad at directions, I also always insist that I know exactly where I am going. I know what you're thinking, but no, I am not a stereotypical man on a sitcom. This is just the way I am.

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I spent the weekend doing something I have always wanted to do: I took a train to a town I knew nothing about, for no reason other than just to do it. 

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A few years ago, my roommates introduced me to the Enneagram, which is a little like the Myers-Briggs, but with less of the fuzzy science nonsense and more of this kind of spiritual pagan thing going for it. So, in other words, I'm basically obsessed with it and I want it to be my husband.

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I like to tell this story whenever I go to the swamp, about how a friend and I used to go there in the depths of summer to draw the alligators. Once we went and sat down to draw this alligator that wasn't so far from us, and we'd look down to draw, and then look up at the alligator, and every time we looked back up, the alligator was a little closer to us than it had been before. Nothing had seemed to have changed; the alligator had just gotten closer.

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If you haven't seen "The Lego Movie" yet, drop everything you are doing and go see it. I'm serious. It's the best movie I have ever seen in my entire life, and all of mankind should watch it, internalize its many messages, and make the world a better place by application. Ignore that Lego is kind of a shitty corporation, and that the movie has a stupid name. Just ignore those things. Everything else about this film is extraordinary.

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