I am sitting in the back of the van watching the Washington mountains shrink into acres upon acres of wheat and sheepish little summer trees. I thought the “Sophie Johnson This Is Your Life” portion of the tour ended in Portland, but we’re driving through the part of eastern Washington that made up the majority of my trips to and from Whitman College for four years.

Portland felt like an emotional hotbed. We set up for the show at the Hawthorne Theatre (which we were sharing with like twelve metal bands on the other side of the building). In high school, I liked to ride the bus to this stretch of Hawthorne and go vintage clothing shopping; I would sit at the Oasis Cafe and eat pizza and watch people who were older and cooler than me pass by. That was heaven. I would look at the shows on the Hawthorne Theatre marquee and imagine what kind of music they played. (Based on what I learned about the Hawthorne last night, they were probably all metal bands. Exclusively metal. But it was fun to imagine that maybe sometimes a little twee band with a ukelele called “Dig My Way To Hell” might be taking the stage.)

I started to freak out last night. It’s good to know my limit: it’s seven days of traveling in a van, complicated by eating one grilled cheese sandwich out of hungry desperation at an In-N-Out Burger. When I hit my limit, I might start to have an emotional break-down in the middle of a show after getting a (somewhat) disparaging e-mail from a disapproving family member. That breakdown will look like this: a bride-to-be will come up to have Air Sex, and when the time comes for feedback, I will say something like, “Um… it seems like you give good blow jobs.” Which (in case it’s not clear), is not a very smart or good comment. And then, like a perfect storm, I might get back into the van after the show and just sob in the back seat quietly while everyone else happily listens to old Adam Sandler albums and while laughing uncontrollably.

I am a sucker for magazine subscription deals. When Conde Nast sends me a letter, I’m automatically down for a year of “Allure” — especially if it comes with a free hideous “clutch purse” (put in quotation marks because no self-respecting woman would do anything with a free magazine purse, except maybe use it to pick up dog poop). If you wonder how many magazines I subscribe to, I am slightly embarrassed to say that I don’t know for sure. More than 20. And “Teen Vogue” twice. I like having piles of unread magazines to bring on vacations, because it can be difficult to carry a bunch of books, and when you’re done with a magazine you can just leave it at a bus stop, or under someone’s couch. 

Yesterday morning I woke up early at the Phoenix hotel feeling like I needed to exercise. Spending a lot of time sitting in a car can make you feel like all the fat in your body is just slowly coagulating in your butt/ hips area — which may make you good for child-bearing, but it doesn’t feel great when you’re walking around. So I went down to the antiquated second floor of this creaky old hotel and hopped on the treadmill, and turned on excellent early-morning TBS.

Now I’m sitting in the front seat of the van while Rob drives. I usually don’t like to sit in the front seat, because I feel so constantly positive that cars are going to crash, and I tend to reach across the front seat to honk for the driver, or save them from the window crashing into their bodies. So really what I mean is, it’s super-unsafe for me to sit in the front seat of a vehicle. But the guys on this tour don’t care. They’re living dangerously. What would comedy be without dangerous living?

Things have been moving so fast for the past I have felt totally unable to process any thoughts at all. Right now I am sitting at a hipster bar in Phoenix. There’s a really hot girl at the counter with waist-length stick-straight black hair, and I wonder if I’m just as objectifying as all the men in the world for wanting to stare at her, so I’m actively trying not to. Phoenix is hot. At this restaurant, they have an outside option, but it’s like they can tell that people aren’t going to tolerate straight-up outside dining, so the entire outdoor area is being spritzed with water — which turns to steam before it hits the people. Everyone wins.

We’re driving through New Mexico now — flat and cactusy. To my left there’s an enormous dairy farm with hundreds of sad-looking cows corralled around sadder-looking grain-feeding basins. To their left there’s Mexico. I can’t shake how weird it is to know that just beyond a fence as far away from me right now as my job in New Orleans is from my house in New Orleans, there’s serious poverty and violence and people who wish to get away from it, but aren’t allowed to. I am not equipped to write an essay about immigration and the sad state of affairs around human rights in our country, but there is certainly something profound and harrowing about the view.

I’m in the way back of a van driving through Texas after a big, full show in Austin last night. Austin has all the day-cool of Portland and all the night-cool of Los Angeles, and it’s unbelievably intimidating. Austin feels like the city that’s going to tell me that I haven’t earned my bird tattoos yet, and I’ll have to start an organic energy bar-making company before I can show my face in public. This is not to say that anyone in Austin has ever been anything but kind and loving toward me (they have even complimented my bird tattoos, so there goes that theory). It’s to say that I am innately paranoid, and my decision to stay inside every night no matter where I am is thereby justified. 

A long time ago, I told people I did not like to travel. I think felt like, in a sort of backward way, this made me more exotic; sort of like not having any tattoos. Also, when I was 16 my family took me on this really nice trip to Italy (it’s so hard when your class strata forces you to go to Europe — UGH), and I really missed my boyfriend, so I sulked the whole time and sullenly ate (delicious, delicious) pizzas. 

At the end of the wonderful, campy 2004 movie “Saved!,” Jenna Malone has this line that makes makes me cry every time, even though I know it’s coming. The stodgy-but-sexy pastor-principal at her all-Christian school is trying to kick her gay ex-boyfriend out of the prom (got that?), and he says, “The Bible is black-and-white about this.” In response, Jenna says, with her lip quivering but her shoulders strong, “Why would God make us all so different if he wanted us to be the same?”

Right now I am in Austin, TX, where Ben Stevens, one of my best friends in the world, lives with his partner Jen. (Yes: Ben and Jen. They rhyme. They know.) They live in a house with a disarmingly polite dog (Brodie; he is frightened of water and looks somber and calculated when he begs to get up on the sofa), two cats, and a turtle. They eat brussels sprouts for dinner and have a list of all the directors whose movies they want to watch together (it's Miyazaki right now). Jen studies poverty in sub-Saharan Africa -- they just visit Malawi a month ago and saw hippos and giraffes and all the other beautiful things one would expect to see on a trip like that. Ben is an engineer with a graduate degree and a paycheck, like exactly zero other twenty-somethings I have ever met. Maybe it looks good from the outside. And that is because it is good. Outside and in.

I just re-read The Odyssey. If you had told me ten years ago that I would ever re-read The Odyssey by choice, I would have assumed that the future was some kind of dystopian Minority Report-type of place where "choices" were forced upon us and autonomy was a relic of the past. I disliked The Odyssey on par with castor oil and CSPAN2, and what with all the books there are to read in the universe, I assumed the likelihood I'd ever pick it up again was nil.

The morning light is stretching out in bands across the observation car, which has largely emptied out since last night. It’s 6 a.m. and we’re holding in Sacramento; the people on the train are mostly asleep. But this car contains the waking exceptions and general misfits: a bouncy, pigtailed six-year-old; a gorgeously rotund man in sunglasses and a Hawaiian print shirt eating a box of doughnut holes; and my favorite (not to play favorites, but): an angry programmer in a utility jacket wearing a long silver Star of David necklace, shouting every few minutes at his computer and no one in particular, “You’ve gotta be kidding me!”
 

In December I spent the holiday at my childhood home in Portland and went through my boxes of old diaries and journals because I'm into self-abuse and shame. Then I scanned some of the entries and wrote letters to my past self from the perspective of my current self. You can read those here. 

I figured it was time to do that again, whereas there are literally thousands of pages of unaddressed issues, and Past Sophie could use some more comforting tough love. (She was in a default state of outspoken martyred melancholia). 

I like presenting at conferences, probably mostly because I'm an egoist. I like hearing myself speak, and I like essentially holding other people hostage to hear me speak. But, also, I like the work I do and I believe in it. In case you don't know me and need some background here, I'm entering my seventh year teaching in New Orleans. I work with kids who have "Emotional/ Behavioral Disorders."* We make art together to engage in so-called "Social Emotional Learning,"* and I develop resources to share with other teachers who want them. It's a cool job.

Until I was well into high school, summer meant just two things: 1. It was hot enough that Mom bought Diet Coke to keep around the house (awesome); and 2. THE POOL. The pool was the most significant detail about summer by far. Our neighborhood pool, which was owned by the local high school, was a five minute walk from my house. My sister Alexis and I were even allowed to walk there without an adult. Probably because my parents were thrilled to get rid of us.

Last week was the worst week ever. It was bad in that way that stubbing your toe is bad -- you know what I mean: it's not that bad-seeming, so you don't have anyone's sympathy or support, but man, it really hurts. You know? Last week was composed of a series of uncomfortable circumstances that were not so severe as they were manifold. I started teaching fourth grade and found out I am terrible at teaching fourth grade. I consistently forgot my lunch at home every day. When I was working out in the morning (Hey: I was working out in the morning; that's a shitty situation in and of itself) a cockroach climbed on my toe. Then I screamed at it, and instead of taking the scream to mean, "Please get off my toe," the cockroach took the scream to mean, "Please climb up my leg as fast as possible."

Fourth grade was the year things started to change. In third grade, all the girls in my class were still too scared to watch Are You Afraid of the Dark, and you still got bragging rights for bringing a coloring book to school that had peel-off stickers in it. In third grade, you still had to invite everyone in your class to your birthday party, because friendship was not about personality similarity, it was about who lived closest to your mom's house. Third grade was blissful and simple. Fourth grade was a battlefield.

The first play I ever wrote was called "55 Dollar Refrigerator." I was 16, and I was immensely proud of it. This was during a time in my life when I colored my hair dark blue and wore vampire-red lipstick and lined my eyes so heavily I was convincing as a raccoon. It was also a time when I was watching a lot of "Degrassi: The Next Generation." (If you missed that show because you were cursed with merely basic cable, the tagline was, "It goes there." Popular themes were: school shootings, self-mutilation, stabbing. This wouldn't have been funny if the characters weren't all rich Canadian white kids. Except for Drake. Drake starred as a rich Canadian black kid.) What I'm really trying to say here is that for me, art was an opportunity to show the world how seriously deep and tortured I was, if it wasn't already abundantly obvious.