i'm lost

does anyone else watch lost? i want to give up, but i just can't.


i drove to santa barbara this afternoon. i dragged my feet to put everything in the car, prepared to be gone for 1-2 weeks. leaving, because i must, because i am unemployed. i have to fight the urge to run into any business and beg for them to let me work. i am too old to be unemployed. i am too old to be doing any of this nonsense. i've spent the past two months surrounded by 19-22 year olds. in mammoth, i am not so old, i blend into the 19-22 year old lifestyle quite nicely. it is when i start to drive back home, back to santa cruz, back to reality really, that i start to panic. it is a real soul shaking kind of thing to look a 19 year old peer in the face and think of all the years of experiences, both bad and good, that have happened since i was 19. what has made me, me. how little i knew about who i was going to be. during my drive i tried to think of everything that happened to me between 19 and now. how it was that i got here, in the car driving back to santa barbara:

i moved to italy
i traveled with my brother and crashed a motorino in greece
i wrote an awesome thesis
i collected records
i graduated college
i fell in love
los angeles
i hustled
i fell out of love
protests
i worked my ass off
music, daily, nightly
radio station
my car got stolen
i got my heart broken
i lived alone
i lost friends
i found them again
a million moves
i hiked to the bottom of the grand canyon
i drove for 4 years straight
i collected danish furniture
i traveled in australia in an rv with my family (and discovered my undying love for australian cancer council sunglasses)
san francisco
i ran a marathon
i ran a business
i spent ten million hours in awe of my amazing friends and family
i fell in love
i had a breakdown
i had surgery
i said enough is enough and put everything in storage
i worked at mammoth as a lift operator

who would i be without this? without all the rest that happened in between these landmarks that are just as important? (how could i leave out eating at alegria with katie and joey while we tried to sort our lives out? that was fundamental to where i am now.) how could my 19 year old self found me now without this map?