salt water

after a heavy visit home
i planned my summer vacation days to take a few days down at the jersey shore just a few days later.
I brought two magazines, two books, a journal, and an iPod
But once I got there, the only thing I could bring myself to do was sit and take in the waves, the sunshine and the breeze.
the sound of a wave crashing is perhaps my favorite sound on earth.
"there is something very healing about salt water," someone in my office said to me.
and that is just exactly how i feel right now.
i feel a little bit better.
i walked away with a nice tan, a fresh face, and a load off my chest.
it makes me think that maybe i can live somewhere by the beach but more importantly maybe I should.
it is just that good.

systems of avoidance

this week, with the help of a really smart friend, i re-wrote my statement of purpose for NYU
i talked about my interest in systems of avoidance and socially orchestrated silence
-both in the family and the community-
i talked about acts of violence being seemingly the only means of response in cultures of oppression
i talked about a lot of things with big heady words and sociological painted views
but in the end, i am just trying to understand my family and myself
a found a diary that had been unearthed when Mike re-designed my closet.
the diary is from 1991. it has two "little twin stars" (a couple of sanrio characters)
on the inside cover i wrote my first and last name and then squeezed in my middle name
then on the first page i write, "written by Lindsey Anthony."
as if i was already trying to write my memoirs at ten years old.
i start the entry by saying i am ten years old and its the "hardest age I've gone through since."
I go on to talk about my mother being an alcoholic and explain that it is because she was abused by her parents.
i have a vague memory of writing this entry while sitting on our old brown couch and looking at our fake christmas tree. i go on in the entry about what happened that day which i remember vividly.
but in reading the entry, i was not struck by what i had been through but more about why i had the information i did.
while i admit i was a very precocious child, and i am sure i demanded answers when my mother spiraled down, i am wondering why i was told all the things i was told.
i can see where my opinions that eventually became identifying characteristics were skewed, filtered, given to me at a time when i should have been protected.
like how my brother had been protected.
my father made a joke the other day about how maybe i could "support him for once"
and i'd like to tell him, "that's all i ever do."
the diary had another entry a few months later, when my mom just came home from betty ford
and then another entry a few months later, just six days before she left.
i found the diary in 97 and wrote another entry in it
i was 14 and pissed off, and painfully dramatic
and then there is another entry in 98 where i claim my father is a "saint."
it is interesting and painful to see this stuff, but i'm really glad i am finding it now
and reading it with a new set of eyes finally.
i don't want to be pissed off at my dad for ten years.
and in the end there's no way i can let myself be mad at all at him.
he will always be the one who stayed.
i just need some time and space to process things, something i  have never given myself.
in 1992, my ten-year old self wrote, "Memories and memories all done in the past but still follow in the future.It doesn't matter if it was years ago. It stays with you."