Here are things I miss - in a stream of consciousness sort of way:

Watching Gilmore Girls with Mom, the way I can settle next to her on the couch and how I fit perfectly against her, and how it feels like time can never take that away, like perhaps she’ll always be able to make me feel like her baby. And I guess, how simple everything was at that time in my life. I miss all the regular things that I could prop my life up against for guidance and a sense of structure - the trivial things that I used to think were just filler but have turned out to be surpisingly fundamental. I miss those.

They say San Diego doesn’t have seasons, but really it does, in a beautiful, subtler way. And I feel myself missing the way Summer indiscreetly makes it’s exit while Fall slips secretly in, back at home, how the light changes and the air has a go at being crisp but actually just loses it’s summer thickness and feels fresh and slightly thinner. Maybe places with four distinct seasons are nicer or more exciting, but to me it feels unnecessarily harsh. San Diego has an artfully smooth way of changing seasons, like the atmosphere is running on some implicit poetic meter. I love the way the ocean is beautiful and welcoming no matter the time of year, how the beaches have a constancy that makes them addicting in a life-giving sense. I am honestly convinced that San Diego holds the copyright on casual and unforced classiness.

And maybe more than anything, I miss the in-between moments of home. I love the quality of light in the late afternoon – how it brings all the colors to fruition – and when Dad gets home from work we sometimes get out the camera and take pictures outside of the hummingbirds or the sunset. And the way cups of coffee bring us all together – in the kitchen or the patio outside, sometimes we rehash our days but sometimes we just soak up the stillness of the afternoon or midmorning together. I miss the way that a house can harbor memories and perhaps parts of me, too, in the most unusual places. Even while my flat is finally becoming home, it’s not the same way that home is home. Here my lamp and my desk and closet are just that. But at home, my closet is the one that has awful neon colored drawers that I love only because Dad expressly painted them so, thinking I’d like them. And my room has traces of all my friends, knickknacks or notes they left that are irritatingly scattered about my desk. And how the laundry room is a whole world of hidden treasures, and sometimes I stumble upon an old box that takes me back and there goes my whole day.

I've just finished reading Tender is the Night and I feel as though it deserves some recognition....and finding my own words insufficient, I've posted some descriptions by other readers. If nothing else, this work is provokingly beautiful because of the painful truth embedded in it. I believe literature based on the sadder truths is slightly less enjoyable to read but all the more magnificent.


"Gatsby was a tour de force, but this is a confession of faith." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, on his book, Tender is the Night.


¨Tender is the Night flows like a tone poem, vividly capturing the illusions and sickened foundations of its flawed protagonists, and the escapist existence in which they dwell. Herein lay ghosts, drifting through splendor, oblivious until it is too late, and then insensate still, crippled by self-imposed restrictions: the patterns of denial, dissipation and dream-death.¨


¨To define the myriad qualities of Tender is the Night into simplistic buzz-word recommendation: this is a haunting, occasionally stunning work, with beautifully lyrical prose and well-defined conflict, interspersed with casual insights into the urges/constructs of human reality.¨


¨F. Scott Fitzgerald, and by extension his work, was/is inescapably tied with the exuberant facade of the Jazz Era, an era defined (at least in the socialite sense) by its splendor and waste, its heedless optimism blind of cost. And though Scott basked in the cradle of this opulent "season," the author seething beneath the fly-by-night exterior could not help but be keenly aware of its follies and hypocrisies: his novels and short stories savagely depict the inward condemnation he felt. But unlike earlier efforts, this, Scott's last completed novel, was composed between 1925 and 1934, and the disintegration of the roaring 20's into the dust-bowl Depression of the 30's seems to me clearly represented in the progression from Tender is the Night's first to third books - the illusion has crashed and there is no regaining it, despite the determined dissipative efforts contrary.¨


And here are some quotes from the novel:

"You told me that night you'd teach me to play. Well, I think love is all there is or should be. Anyhow..."


"In the dead white hours of Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in."


"Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy - one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself."


"You know, you're a little complicated after all." "Oh no," she assured him hastily, "No, I'm not really--I'm just a--I'm just a whole lot of different simple people."


"All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love," Dicked mourned persistently. "Isn''t that true, Rosemary?"

"Do you know what time it is?" Rosemary asked.
"It's about half-past one."
They faced the seascape together momentarily.
"It's not a bad time," said Dick Diver. " It's not one of the worst times of the day."

"Her naïveté responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world's bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at."

Here is what calms my soul on days when I feel like Spain has knocked the wind out of me:
(today happens to be one of those days)

1. Hand-written letters from Grandma.
2. Amos Lee
3. 45 céntimos coffees from the machines around campus
4. Literature - currently: Fitzgerald´s Tender Is The Night
5. And most of all - sweet words from my Savior.

¨Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.¨ -Philippians 4:6-7


¨Sometimes we forget who we got,
Who they are.
Oh, who they are not.
There is so much more in love,
Than black and white.
Keep it loose child,
Gotta keep it tight.
Keep it loose child,
Keep it tight¨
- Amos Lee

¨....for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.¨-Philippians 4:11-13