Recently I've been feeling heavy conviction about acting on emotions when they are at great heights. This includes writing (for everyone to see), hence my absence from here for five months.  I'm feeling stable tonight. The last few months have been overwhelming, difficult, and wonderful. I can only recall them through sensations in my head (moss, the smell of salty sea air on a bike, mint shisha and cloves, hearing seagull parties from across the lake, charcoal covered hands, puppy breath, firework smoke, etc.). If I didn't take pictures I wouldn't remember anything at all.

Tonight marks the end of my sixteenth day living in Seattle. It is nothing like what I imagined. I am not perfectly happy in a rainy utopia where I can wear a sweater and afford a cup of espresso every day. Most days are unbearably hot and I'm awoken in the middle of the night by sirens and I sit on the bus with a bunch of crazies hoping that just one normal, level-headed person would give me a really big hug and invite me over to eat mashed potatoes and ask to be my friend. My favorite things so far include the balcony at Joe Bar, waking up next to an open window, the movie theater, wind, walking across the bridge over I-5, rice, and a multitude of pigeons and seagulls in the same city. My least favorite things include catching my landlord high, fruit flies, transvestites that look mean, the public transit in general, and the lack of time I find in each day.

Already I have been blessed in many, many ways. I have a roommate that doesn't hate me and is fiercely protective of me. I attend a church that is in walking distance and wants to take my gifts and talents as an artist and teach me how to use them in ways that glorify God and not myself. I have a job. I have a precious little apartment that is very cheap and very close to everything essential to my life. I have wonderful people back home reminding me daily that I am cherished and not forgotten. Seattle is the most beautiful city and having the opportunity to live here is enough.

Cornish College of the Arts is altogether lovely and I'm excited to start learning there. This year I'll be taking Foundations, Art History, Social Identities and the Arts, Digital Imaging, and Figure Drawing. My schedule is pretty sparse, so I'll also be working as many hours as my sanity will allow. Working at Starbucks is a rigorous exercise of my patience and I can't image I will last long in that endeavor when school starts. My plan for the next month is to explore every possible facet of the city, and I am finding great delight in not knowing the tiniest bit of what will happen in the next year, the next month, and even this next week.

Today I learned why Nikki and I are roommates and the greatest of friends. Both of us roamed the city separately; I, walking home from work, stumbled upon an antique shop, Nikki, exploring the northern neighborhoods of Capitol Hill, stumbled upon a garage sale. Both of us singled out a piece of art that we couldn't leave without. Both pieces of art are, in more ways than not, practically the same:

(Nikki's painting)

(my copper sculpture)