august 17.

I've downloaded Timehop, allowing the alerts to greet me as soon as I unlock my phone. I've enabled Facebook's "On This Day," marking the notifications unread until I've scrolled through each memory. I start most days this way: lying in bed after my alarm goes off, scrolling through memory lane. Last year, I Instagrammed the beautiful waterfalls I hiked past while on retreat for my new job. Three years ago, I tweeted about being one week away from hopping on a plane to India. Seven years ago, my best high school friend wrote on my wall to tell me that she would always always always be my friend.

These snippets of the past are kind of like the songs that bring you back to that one night, that one feeling, that one moment in time. But these snippets are always the good stuff -- they're the songs you danced to at that sleepover, the one that played during that kiss, and the one you belted at karaoke. I see the picture of the waterfall and get the same excited butterflies in my stomach that I had as a three-day-old employee. I see the tweet and physically ache for Bangalore and the feeling of hopping on an international flight with my travel pack. I see the post from my friend and immediately screen shot it to her with a few heart emojis, grateful that her promise is still true. These are such good moments.

But what about the rest?

What about the nitty gritty stuff of our hearts and guts that isn't recorded on social media? What about the just-as-real (and maybe even-more-real) stuff of our lives that was around before social media? Timehop and Facebook leave out the stuff that reminds us of the loneliness or the recent breakup or the friendship drama. They don't play the song that we looped on repeat when we said goodbye for the last time, or the one that we had to avoid for awhile, or the one that has always made us tear up a bit. There aren't many Instagrams or tweets that bring up hard stuff, or under-the-surface stuff. This is, of course, by our own choosing -- we purposefully record and remember the butterflies over the breakups, the excitement over the dread, the "life is great" over the "life is great but also really complicated." But still, we feel the real stuff's absence; it's the missing part of our perfectly crafted and curated scroll down memory lane each day.

I needed to look up a date and a memory for an essay-in-progress in an old journal tonight and found that real stuff staring at me from the pages of my bright orange, tulip-covered journal from the summer of 2005. I flipped through pages and found unsent love letters to multiple boys, printed transcripts of AOL Instant Message conversations with those same boys, and my insights into friendship and relationships and school. I found today's date.

August 17, 2005: "I'm ready for school to start. Pumped. I love rain. Last night we went to bed at 5! Time for me to roll out = now (11:22)!"

I read the full entry, giggling alone in my apartment and wondering why I ever thought I should use the phrase "roll out," even if it was just for my eyes only. I returned the journal to its box and pulled out my bright pink, daisy-covered one from the summer of 2006.

August 17, 2006: "He was like 'Where have you been?' and I said 'around.' He was like 'around, huh?' and I said 'Yeah I've sent you a few texts the past few days' and he goes 'yeah' and some other stuff. He said he'd try to call me sometime. I think it was fate."

First, I laughed. (Fate? Really?) And then I kept searching through the pages, unearthing the multicolored hearts and flipping open the elephant with the balloon and holding the engraved feathers, finding the under-the-surface words and feelings from each August 17, the stuff and stories that my Timehop and Facebook wouldn't bring up each year.

August 17, 2008: "I went to a High School Musical 2 party! It was super fun even though I didn't know everyone there very well!"

August 17, 2012: "I explained that I couldn't let him take me out to dinner because I had just gotten out of a long-term relationship and am going away. In other words, this is how my heart feels: UGGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!"

August 17, 2014: "How on earth will I know if this is the right path for me? Don't I just need to take one step and then see how that goes? What if I change my mind? Then I do. Dreams and plans and timelines can change. They always do."

As I read each entry, I moved past the picture-perfect parts and into the "life is great but also really complicated" ones. There wasn't a filter or spellcheck or missing snippets in this memory lane. It was all there, messy handwriting and weird analogies and rambling monologues and all. 

And now, this one's there too.

August 17, 2015: I had already Instagrammed my three closest gals from our 7 am breakfast date today. I took my first coffee art photo and started writing my "I just started drinking coffee" Instagram post in my head. I snapped a few pictures of my students, capturing the silly icebreakers and the birthday celebrations and the sacred conversations. But there is more to this August 17 than these good, post-worthy snippets. There was the walk home from work -- to a home I've been living in for over a year now, to a bed which is finally unlofted after an epic battle with the mattress and frame. There was the writing about Wicked and watching Ross and Rachel and their new baby on Friends and, now, the reliving of so many August 17s. Good and hard, big and little, and under-the-surface pieces that make up this day.

According to Timehop and Facebook, August 17 has not been a special day in the history of my life. Except that it is. Of course it is. Because life -- good, bad, and real -- happened then and is happening now. August 17 was fun in 2008 and heartbreaking in 2012 and insightful in 2014. And now, in 2015, it's an ode to my journaling, or to anyone's journaling, or to creating an outlet to remember the under-the-surface, "life is great but also really complicated" stuff somehow. It's also a reminder that memories exist outside of those that social media reminds us of, that the unseen and undocumented snippets matter just as much -- if not more -- than those that show up on our screens. And it is a plea to my future self, who will see this on August 17, 2016: sit with and learn from and let all the snippets of your life, from August 17 and all the other days, show up beyond your screen.

Let them live in your heart and guts.

i'm sleeping on the floor.

“I’m sleeping on the floor.”

It was the middle of the night in the middle of a 36-hour Amtrak ride from Portland to Fargo, and we were trying to figure out just how we were going to sleep. Falling asleep is hard when you’re squished into two seats that only recline 45 degrees. It’s even harder when your seat partner has five-foot femurs (Steph) and when you have never been able to fall asleep on a moving vehicle (you) and when you’ve already been on the train for 24ish hours (both of us, along with 14 other students returning from an intense alternative break trip where we slept on a church floor for seven nights). After shifting and cuddling and tangling our limbs, we decided that our best chance at success was to divide and conquer: one of us would lie across the seats. And the other would sleep on the floor.

This sparked the biggest “fight” in our almost-six year friendship. And by fight, I mean we spent the next 30-ish minutes discussing, debating, and arguing over why the other person should be the one to sleep on the train seats. Steph is the most stubborn human on this earth and explained all of the logical reasons why I should get the chairs: I had just worked so hard to coordinate all the logistics for the trip, and didn’t I have to work in the morning?, and she would actually have more room for those five-foot femurs if she could stretch out on the floor. I don’t have a persuasive bone in my body, so I’m sure I just said things like, “But, but...no! You take the seats!” or, “No, Steph, I really don’t want to sleep on the chairs. I like sleeping on floors!” We went back and forth, raising our voices ("NO! I am!") and making empty threats ("I won't talk to you for a week if you won't sleep on the floor!") and laughing ("This is ridiculous -- we could have been sleeping by now.”). We kept saying, "I'm sleeping on the floor," only to be met with, "No, I'm sleeping on the floor."

We've said this sentence hundreds of times to each other now. When I stay late to do the dishes after she’s invited me over for dinner, because I know she hates them and we’re far past the point of the typical “the hostess has to take care of everything from start to finish” relationship but she still argues with me: “I’m sleeping on the floor.” When she gets in her car before I can protest and drives across town to pick me up because my car's fender is about to fall off, and then claims it gives us an extra 15 minutes of catch-up time before I can apologize: “I’m sleeping on the floor.” When I stay long-after the end of a sold-out pizza and pie event to haul garbage and unload the uHaul and then drop off the uHaul with her, only to then be accompanied to my post-midnight housesitting and cleaning and laundry duties, even though she’s been pizza-ing and pie-ing for 17 hours: “I’m sleeping on the floor.”

“Me too."

I don’t remember who slept on the floor that night on the Amtrak. Honestly, I’m sure we both did at some point. But who slept where isn’t the point of this story. Keeping tabs on who slept on the floor, or who did the dishes twice in a row, or who paid for the last beers during happy hour — these things don’t have a place in this deep, true friendship. It’s an unspoken rule: we give when we can, whether that’s doing the dishes or taking the check or sleeping on the floor, and we take when we need to, whether that’s staying seated for an extra five minutes or pocketing that extra five dollars or curling up on two Amtrak chairs. Friendship is all about that give and take, push and pull, yin and yang, floor-sleeps and Amtrak-chair-sleeps. Sometimes you sleep on the floor, sometimes she does. Sometimes you join each other down there because you'd rather just be together, even if it means being squished next to her five foot femurs.

In Steph, I have found a soulfriend who laughs and cries and dreams and frets and rages and eats and shares and exists — so authentically, so compassionately, so truthfully — and meets me wherever I am in my brain or my day or the world. I hope that you, too, find a friend who will join you where you are, who will sleep on the floor for — or, better yet, with — you.

Before the Amtrak Debacle of 2013. (Portland, OR -- February 2013 -- Photo: Cathryn Erbele.)

this is a public service announcement.

This is a Public Service Announcement.

Stop scoffing at how the subtitle of this book includes both "advice" and "love" and is written by someone called Sugar. Forget everything you think you know about advice columns. Tuck away your feelings about how silly they are. Set fire to the idea that only desperate people write in to them. Whether you are a 24-year-old living far away from home or a 62-year-old who has never left home, there is some part of your life that needs both advice and love. From Sugar. Accept that no matter how finely stitched or tightly wound or perfectly scheduled your life is, there is always room for more love.

Google Map your local library or used bookstore or not-used bookstore. Go there. If you can't go right now, put a Post-It in your paper planner or an appointment in your iCal so you can go as soon as you have an hour of freedom from your job, your other job, your responsibilities, or your other responsibilities. Get it in your hands. (Don’t use an e-reader.)

If it's not there, put it on hold. Request that another copy be ordered for you and shipped to the store, or better yet, to your front door. Don’t wait and return in a week or two or when you know you'll have more time to read. You won't go back, because you'll come up with all sorts of excuses as to why you don't have enough time right now. Right now will turn into this summer will turn into this year will turn into this life. There is never enough time in life to read things that aren't gross bills reminding you of the capitalist patriarchy, or the airline credit card offers that show up in your mailbox every Monday, or the textbooks you're supposed to want to read because their titles match your future degree. Get it now and find the time later. Make a habit of reading one chapter before bed or getting up one hour early to sit in your lime green chair with the next chapter. 

When you have the book in your hands, flip through the pages. Read what Sugar says inside the front cover. Look at the empty margins, the crisp corners, and the meager 26 letters filling 353 pages with thousands of words and maybe just as many revelations for your life. Now move the book into one hand and grab a pen with the other. A highlighter works too. Whisper a little apology to the book; because by the time you get to this line on page 15 -- “The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love” -- you will already have covered it with ink and tears. You will have smudged it with your greasy face oils as you buried your face deep into that sentence and breathed in its truth. 

Dog-ear the top corners so you can use that quote on page 130 for an Instagram caption, or so you can easily find 'The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us’ to read out loud to your roommate one rainy night, or so you can remind yourself of whatever you need to be reminded of next week or next year. The questions you need to ask yourself will come hurtling through these pages straight into your gut. They will lead you to answers that have been there all along, but have been in hiding or hibernation because they will bring a devastating but maybe-much-needed hell that may or may not turn into a definitely-much-needed heaven. Turn to page 155 to be reminded that "every last one of us can do better than give up." Wherever this book brings you to in your life, it will be okay.

Put it on a shelf, or better yet, near your bed. Pull it down when you are full of uninhibited joy and naïve optimism, and pick it up when you are completely drained of those things. Especially then. Read your favorite column, the one that speaks to you and resonates with you and makes the world seem a bit brighter. Read it again. Read it one more time, out loud to yourself. Tell your friends about it. Make them sit criss-cross-applesauce on the floor with you or on the other side of the FaceTime screen with you as you say the salutation ("Dear Sugar") and until you say the closing ("Yours, Sugar"). They will listen to Sugar's words. They will listen to yours.

If you find that this book was not for you, give it to someone who might make it theirs. Let it feed them. If you find that this book was perfect and made for you, still give it to someone so they can make it theirs too. There is enough for everyone.

Eventually, you will find another book. Get a title from a friend, mentor, or stranger on the bus. Ask them about one that has moved them, rattled them, taken care of them in a way that only books can. Remember the title. Write it down. Thank them for it. There is nothing stronger and more intimate than recommending a title to someone, and having them read it.

Then, if they ask for a recommendation in return, share this -- or your very own -- Public Service Announcement for your favorite tiny, beautiful book.

buy the song.

I have one song in my iTunes library.

I downloaded it on a late, hot August night, when almost a hundred people crowded into a home just a few blocks away from where I had spent the last four years studying, working, and becoming. Everyone was there to play beer pong, eat chips and salsa and chips and hummus, and have one last reckless summer night before “real life” started again in September. Most of them were there to say goodbye — to me and Steph, as we prepared to drive a UHaul (which was already parked in the driveway, already halfway loaded up with our lives) across the country to start anew in Portland. You know the rest.

I remember a lot of things about that night. I remember sneaking upstairs with one of my best friends and crying over the card she gave me and realizing our friendship would forever be altered the minute I pulled away from our hug and from Fargo. I remember sneaking away from the party to play on the nearby playground and swinging, swinging, swinging like I was in second grade again. I remember the police officer who knocked on the door, telling us that the party was over and one of our guests telling him it most certainly was not. This was my first real house party. It was all so real and all so cliche and I couldn’t stop smiling the entire night even though I was saying goodbye to all of my people. I felt like I was in a really great and really cheesy movie about college and growing up and moving on. I was, in a way. In my own movie. I was, in a way. Growing up and moving on. It was all perfect.

But I also remember this one moment — the one where I paid $1.29 to download a song. That night, my phone played the songs that kept getting interrupted by the people calling and texting, asking for directions. I turned on Spotify radio for most of the night and let BOY, Haim, and a few Top 40 hits flood the first level of the house and spill into the backyard. Somewhere between a few and several beers into the night, a few guys marched up to me with a request.

“Can we play a song?”

“Sure,” I said, as I handed over my case-free and already-cracked iPhone.

What I don’t remember is how they exited my Spotify app, bypassed searching for it on my YouTube app, and instead found it in my iTunes app and determined that this, this was the best way to listen to their song. I do remember someone passing my phone back to me a few minutes later with the “Sign In to iTunes Store” pop-up window right there, so I could authorize the purchase. I remember looking at their eager faces and giggling as I squinted at my screen and shook my head and thought how I’d spent $1.29 on worse things.

Maybe sometimes we make a choice because it will make others really happy. Or because they have kindly asked us. Maybe sometimes we make a choice because we truly, honestly don’t give two shits about the outcome. Or because we’re curious and feeling carefree. Maybe sometimes we make a choice because we think of all the harder choices we’ve made and then this one comes rushing in as a relief, an easy one, a mindless one.

I handed the phone back to them, and they set it up on the speakers, and then — it started.

“Choices,” by George Jones.

I would never have guessed in a trillion years that acoustic, country chords would gush out of my phone just then. I thought it was going to be Space Jam or R. Kelly or Jump Around or something that we all would have been excited about and then danced to or karaoked to or jumped around to. The guys who requested this song were the only people in the room who swayed and sang. (If you listen to it, you’ll realize it’s not really a song to jump around to.) I think I did a few sympathy sways with them and then went to the snack table. The party went on. (Until the cop finally did convince the previously mentioned guest that the party was most certainly over.)

There isn’t really a moral to this story. I plugged my phone into my computer for the first time in a long time tonight, and my iTunes library popped up with George Jones’ face and his dark sunglasses looking off to the left, and I immediately knew I wanted to write about it. It seems insignificant. The guys probably don’t even remember that they are the guys who did this. The others at the party probably won’t even remember this happening. But I do. I remember. And isn’t that a good enough reason for a story?

I could have deleted the song the morning after the party, as I ran through the night in my head and checked my iTunes to make sure I really did download it. I could have deleted it in the UHaul on the drive out here, as I cleared out the old on my phone to make room for the new. I could have deleted it any time in the last two years, as I plugged my phone into my laptop to save the pictures that have captured my life since that night. Instead, I’ve listened to “Choices” on repeat as I’ve written this, not only to make my grandmother proud that I’m listening to “her kind of country music,” but also to remind myself that a choice is just a choice. It’s not the end of the world or the start of our lives, even though it feels like everything in our world and our lives depends on it. We’ve made choices before and we will make them again. We will sometimes make the same choice over and over and over again and we will sometimes choose differently every single time we’re faced with it. Big and little choices, easy and hard choices, choices for others and choices that might make others mad or sad but that finally — finally — free us.

Life has us make choices all the time — sometimes ones that we are prepared for, sometimes ones that we will never be prepared for, and sometimes ones that shake up our souls in awesome and awful ways. Sometimes at the same time.

And sometimes, if we are lucky, life has us make choices that we just have to close our eyes at and throw our heads back at and giggle at as we type in our iCloud password and buy the song.

one book book club.

Why did people ask, "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

I signed up for English 160 on a whim.

It looked interesting (it was), it was a night class (which meant more time to hang out in the Atrium, my college's social hotspot, during the day), and it counted for a required humanities credit (thanks, liberal arts).

On the first day, after passing out the syllabus and talking through the assignments and giving us a short break halfway through the three hours, Dr. Joan Kopperud showed us author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's now-famous TEDTalk, "The Danger of a Single Story." I had never met Dr. Kopperud before, and I still didn't know what to expect from this course, but after hearing Chimamanda speak the words, "When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise," I realized two things: one, that Monday nights from 6:00-9:00 pm were going to be a literature heaven-on-Earth, and two, that I needed to get to know this professor.

The class came and went each week. I would dash across town from my internship, dash across campus to Academy Hall, dash up to the third floor, books and dinner and highlighters in hand. I would sit in my desk (the same, awkward, left-handed one every week), listening to freshmen and seniors and Dr. Kopperud share thoughts on each book we read. We read fiction and nonfiction and poems and plays that were single stories from India, or Saudi Arabia, or England, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I questioned why I had decided not to become an English teacher; I wondered how I could live a life that wasn't surrounded by reading and sharing literature with others every day. I panicked that I hadn't chosen the right major; I poured through the course catalog and my senior year schedule, trying to squeeze any other English courses into my last two semesters (I didn't). And, I (eventually and timidly) asked Dr. Kopperud if she would have coffee with me outside of class. She, with all her energy and kindness and openness, agreed.

A class that started as a core curriculum requirement quickly became a space to confront the unknown in each chapter, ask questions about each story, and write not-totally-researchy papers about them. A professor that started as a name next to the most ideal class time quickly became a mentor, cheerleader, and permanent book-recommender. She also became the person who gifted me a hardly-used food processor before I moved across the country, who makes time in her schedule to grab coffee when I'm back home from across the country, and who ventured to my new home across the country with another of my college-year-and-still-now mentors. The whims -- the things you hardly think about, the things that require minimal brainpower at the time, like entering the Course Registration Number for English 160 as you register for the spring semester of your junior year -- can burrow deep into your heart and stick around to shape your own story.

During our coffee date this January, over Starbucks and swapping book titles, I mentioned how I wanted to join a book club in Portland, but felt a little overwhelmed by the idea. (Once a month? Sometimes it takes me two months to get through two short stories. Saturday mornings? I don't leave my room until at least 11:00 am. Through a Meetup group? Maybe I'm more of an introvert than I think I am...) Dr. Kopperud, with that same energy and kindness and openness as when I first asked her to coffee three years before, leaned in and smiled. She went on to tell me what she's been doing with her girlfriends for years: a One Book Book Club.

So tonight, I made a sign for my apartment door and threw some frozen pizzas in my oven as a group of women gathered around a pile of Americanahs in the middle of my living room floor. Some had read the book in its entirety in two days; some had yet to crack open the cover. We were from Arizona and Zimbabwe, rural and "urban" North Dakota. We were full-time employees and students and volunteers, part-time writers and dancers and yogis. We shared our own stories and learned more about each other's as we talked about this single story and all that it brought up -- race and gender and love and privilege. One book, one evening, and one club that (I hope) will shift and grow and share more books and more evenings and more stories; a One Book Book Club.

I still have each book I read during English 160. They sit ear-marked and underlined on my bookshelf, next to an ear-marked and underlined Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, reminding me of the danger of a single story (and how whims and 20-minuted TEDTalks and energetic, kind, and open professors can make your own story much more interesting and full circle-y). Now, every book that is a part of the Portland edition of One Book Book Club will, in some small way, be part of that semester -- and will be a part of my story too.