**Please let our future daughter get his gorgeous curls**

Okay. I clicked on like three different links and still haven’t seen a picture of the dead body. Not cool.

I just want everybody to know that it’s a joke when I talk about autoerotic asphyxiation. Auto implies I’d do it to myself, and quite frankly, I have better plans for my corpse than to be discovered naked and *alone* and dead hanging from a rope.

Also, if I hung myself as a form of suicide, I’d do it fully clothed to avoid any such implications.

This had nothing to do with boxers, but I liked the way the title sounded.

You move on, breathing, breathing, heart beating anyway.
You take a step and maybe you fall and maybe you don’t get up right away, because who can get up anyway.
You keep your eyes on the ground right in front of you because who gives a fuck about the goal, the horizon anyway.
And maybe you don’t get up right away.

You’re not dancing, you’re not running, you’re not even walking, you’re just trying to take. one.more.step.and.forget.
So maybe you don’t get up right away.

You’re thinking about forgetting and dreaming about forgetting and trying to forget and trying not to forget.  This is all you have, the forgetting and the not forgetting.

And you do get up and take one more step, one more step, one more step.  And after one more step you take one more step.

There’s a gleam that you see when you breathe, there’s a gleam that you’ll be when you see.
And you take one more step and you don’t have to look at the ground so you look around for the gleam that you glimpse when you breathe.

The sun rises and you see your forgetting sometimes in the shadows but you take one more step one more step.

Another breath another step another moment and you forget. You forget that you were even trying to forget.  This is the way it happens, this is the way that it’s supposed to happen, the breathing and the forgetting and the moving on without you without this me him her.  This is the way it’s meant to be.

My dad graduated from college this weekend. I was able to be in New Orleans for the ceremony and I am so so glad I was! It was very moving, as the graduating class had their freshman orientation two days before Hurricane Katrina hit. The speakers at the ceremony applauded them for coming back to Tulane and credited them for a large part of the New Orleans revival. I cried a lot.

Ellen DeGeneres spoke at the graduation and it was one of the funniest and most moving speeches I have ever heard. And yes, she danced.

The best part, though, was seeing my dad walk across the stage. He’s always been my hero and now at his age he has a college degree and it looks like he’ll be more successful than ever. If he can do it, it’s certainly not too late for me to make something out of my life. I was already determined to go back to school, but this has made me even more excited about finishing my degree.

Also, my mom gave me a bunch of plants and I’m completely dorking out over gardening. I’m on my way out the door to plant some cucumbers.

That’s what’s up with me. What’s up with you?

I’m obsessed with my Google reader. There are so many things to learn and read about! I’m subscribed to blogs about food, fashion, weddings, interior design (omg love), music, crafts .. everything.

I’m starting to not feel so stuck in the 90s. (It also helps that apparently the 90s are back in a big way as far as fashion goes. Helllooooo grunge! How we’ve missed you.)

Interview Friday.

Oh my god I haven’t eaten in 24 hours.

I applied for a job at Books-A-Million today. I got impatient about the whole “waiting for an interview that’s still two weeks away” thing. I dunno how I feel about it. We’ll see.

So we got a black president and Texas starts talking about seceding from the Union. Orly. Big surprise.

That’s all today.

Well, we’re for-real for-sure in the last days of the Amy-and-Eric-not-working thing. Eric will start back to work in the next week or so.. we’re not exactly sure on that one but we never are.  I have an interview on May 1 for a summer job if I don’t find anything permanent before then.

We’ve had fun, even if we hate not working.  (Yeah sure.)  We’ve had a ton of “date nights” ..  I’m not sure they count if you’re not doing anything else, but whatever.  We learned to make sushi.. that was awesome. We’ve had fried catfish and crabcakes.. it’s basically been like an at-home culinary vacation.

So that’s up with me.  Literally. I’ve learned to cook a few more things, and that’s all that’s up with me.

Oh I diagnosed myself as having an anxiety disorder.  Like that took any brains to figure out.  I’ll be checking with a dr on that as soon as I can.

Job interview. 10:30 am. *freaking out.*

Things will go back to normal (in a whole new way) once I finally get a job. Whether that’s good or not is entirely dependent on whether you like me more as a freaked-out spaz or as just a neurotic wanderer.

Waiting is no fun. There’s the eager anticipation of hearing the phone ring, the breathless rush to grab it when it does, the inevitable letdown that it’s not a job offer even if it’s someone I really want to talk to. And then there’s the moments when anxiety crashes down on me, how it crushes my chest so I have to take a few short breaths before I can catch a long one again; where I can feel my heart beating faster and it feels like it’s taking up too much space in my chest; when I can feel the blood drain from my hands and I know if I try to stand up at that moment I’ll feel weak and lightheaded; why sometimes I get very very quiet and then make too much noise to cover up the silence and the thoughts.

In another three weeks everything will be different, but that’s not my story to tell yet, in this place in this time. It’s just an unknown, some empty variable to confound me when I try to fit the rest of the equation in place.

I have to do better with the not thinking about it too much until it gets here, living in the rightnow instead of the tomorrowandnextweek. I have to learn to appreciate what I have in the moment I have it, or I’ll be looking back one day at a lifetime of what’s-going-to-happen-next instead of here-I-am.

Truth, though, is it’s getting to be where the proving must be, an uncomfortable place where we are either people who can make-it-work-no-matter-what, or people who will fall apart once-and-for-all. And this is truth.