I've moved.
You can now find me at jopickle.wordpress.com. Blogger has been great, but Wordpress has a ton of features and they're easy to use, so it was time for a change.
of laughter, of tears, of a breakdown, of a breathrough, of greatness
You can now find me at jopickle.wordpress.com. Blogger has been great, but Wordpress has a ton of features and they're easy to use, so it was time for a change.
I thought I had been cold before. I've lived in Pennsylvania and New England. Walked home through woods and snow and ice. I was once even encased in snow while waiting for a ride during a snow storm in Boston. And I was born in a blizzard. So you see, I have plenty of reasons to think I've been cold. But I was so wrong. So, so wrong. I have never been cold like I was cold in Chicago. I wasn't just shivering, my whole body was shaking. Chicago does not joke around. It was 12 degrees out.

Things have changed. It isn't the year I graduated in anymore. It's now 2007, and while I'd like to say I've grown up into an uber cool adult, I haven't. Mostly, I've been the same as I've always been. If anything, I have only become one of the worker ants. Office all day, sleep at night, repeat.
This is how it happens: You are standing on a bus, listening to music and wondering why you can't put words together like that. You are acutely aware of the stranger's hand brushing yours on the pole. At the next stop you are sitting. You are sitting and listening to the music, and looking between the rows of seats through the front window. And much like a future musician who first picks up his instrument, you click. And you know that you will write. Your internal monologue organizes itself into sentences instead of stray thoughts, and you hope, you wish, you believe that maybe this is it. Maybe you can be a writer, even though you'll never be able to make it sound the way it does in your head. Even though for now (and possibly for years to come) there are bills and loan payments and responsibilities and rents to be paid. Someday, there will be novels to be written and lines to be jotted down and rushing home to get it out on paper before it leaves you forever.
If I hear Dr. Phil tell Judy that she just "needs a little Guy-Q" I might scream.

In elementary school, romance was getting picked first for soccer, matching nicknames, sitting next to each other in art class, letting me use the purple cray-pas first.