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How to Say the Right Thing:

by Addy

1. Don't state any facts. Don't say, "This is bad weather," even if it is. Don't say, "That shirt is ugly," even if it is. Don't say, "I'm smarter than you," even if that is a real-life fact. Don't mention that it is still dark and you are already finished with one class, but you don't remember it because you were so tired, even though that ought to be completely understandable because it is still dark outside, even if that's a fact. No one cares about facts that much usually, because they can already see them.


2. Don't verbalize your feelings. Don't shout "I'm so obsessed with you," because that will overwhelm people. Don't shout "I hate you," because it makes people hate you back. Don't say "I don't know how to be all of the things I am supposed to be," because then people feel choked by your feelings and they're like, "Uh."


3. Don't mumble. Also don't say things like, "Meh," or "Ag," instead of real words. And maybe refrain from meowing very much.


4. Don't make an inside joke (e.g. pointing at the ground, or "Totes obv awk," or "I HAVE KIDNEY STONES") because it makes anyone else who is not a part of that joke feel left out and when you've made someone feel left out you probably said the wrong thing.


5. Make the right facial expression for the situation. Furrow your brow when the conversation is about death, blood, break-ups, or math; smile when the conversation is about books, neighborhood boys, sweaters, or Matt Davis. And cats. Smile about cats.


6. Speak loudly and clearly.


7. Look at their eyes.


8. Don't mention cats. Most people don't understand the cat life.


Or maybe just scrap all of that and say the wrong thing all the time, because saying the wrong thing makes you the friends that you actually want to have and and saying the wrong thing gets you the jobs you actually want to have and saying the wrong thing is what makes people laugh and because the saying the wrong thing is what makes people fall in love with you.


In childhood.
All my love,
Addy

And I was like, "..."

We said we were growing down, and we liked ourselves better in cat sweaters. But all it really was was growing up. We realized what mattered and what didn't, don't you think so? We felt childish, but really we realized what we could handle and realized just how much that was. And we realized we didn't have to do things on our own.

It was the realization that we needed each other and that was fine to need someone, because we were children again, and children are allowed to need other people. But really, we were just growing up.

We stopped trying, I think. We stopped wishing so much and pretending to be someone who we were not. Even with keys of our own, we allowed ourselves to be a little bit younger, but also a little bit older.


They gave us so much growing space, but we didn't even notice all of this immense emptiness and crazy-cricket quiet. We just filled up the space and shed our skin and then all of a sudden we were these beautiful, fleshed-out individuals with drivers licenses and Friend-Boys and friends in general and music and youth -- a lot of youth and a lot of growing down, but growing up, also.


We stopped ourselves from overwhelming everyone and we did something right. I think we said something that changed someone or maybe we wrote something that inspired someone or maybe we sung on pitch. Because karma repaid us. Karma repaid us in pop art and telepathy and thrift stores -- but mostly it gave us each other.


Each other and growing down.


It wasn't about being mature and looking old anymore. It was about cat sweaters, but cat sweaters made us smile and our smiles gave us life and our life gave us maturity, but we were too excited about the sweaters that we didn't really even notice how old we'd gotten and how much of our growing space we had filled.


Maybe it's a paradox. Maybe we're a paradox.


We all teetered on the edge of adulthood, but we couldn't see the cliff through our mustaches and our rainbow cupcakes and photobooth pictures. 


I can't even really explain it to you correctly. 


We're children again, but our souls filled up this enormous space in which we were asked to grow and we didn't even see that whole thing going on until it was quiet and our voices were glowing yellow like the fire and our s'mores tasted like hope and also like the past, but a little bit like the future. 


"Now."
All my love,
Addy

Topknots.

Clichés are good, I think. You can say something that everyone understands and lead up to it with, "I know it's cliché, but..." and then no one can make fun of you. Or you can just say it and everyone can laugh at you, but you don't have to use too many words. They're perfect, obviously. I walk around shouting things like, "Ah, to be young and foolish!" and "What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?" because we are a cliché. 

But we're also not a cliché. We've a voice of our own, huh? We've words of our own, yeah? We've got a voice on paper, at least, right? We have great word choice, don't we? 

We're something original, sure, but we're also something not.

We're something not, because at the end of the day, we are all ears, and the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

But mostly we're something not because we still don't know what we've got until it's gone. Even if we're the most original, most alive, most non-cliché people on the face of the planet, we don't seem to notice until we're not. 

We don't realize that we're in love with people until they've packed their bags and hopped on airplanes, or that we like our parents until they have left us to do their job, or that we like books with paper until everyone reads on a Kindle. We don't even seem to see the people with eyes so blue they really should make you stop and stare -- until they've closed their eyes. We didn't pay attention to Kilgore Trout until Kilgore Trout stopped writing. We didn't notice that we liked their hair until they cut it. We didn't realize how much we like being healthy, how much we like each other, how much we like the sunshine, until we were sick and lonely and the rain clouds had rolled in. 

And you didn't love Joseph Gordon-Levitt until he loved Autumn and not you.

We're the elephant in the room. We're the bee's knees. We're unable to fight our way out of a paper sack and we're all bent out of shape. We're the cat's meow and the cat's pajamas and a cat nap and all other cat-related things, too, probably.

We're completely cliché, because after all of these years, we still haven't opened our own eyes to notice the colors of everyone else's, and we won't, until their eyes are gone.

Open your eyes, for heavens sake. Notice the colors. Notice the shapes of the words that you write. Notice the way your overpriced yogurt fills up your self-serve cup before you eat it. Notice the way the bass guitar carries the songs that you sing along to. Notice the way Mojgani's voice carves out his words, because you are his words, and you are my words, too, and everyone else's words, because we're just a product of a whole bunch of words, but you've never even noticed that, have you? So notice it. Notice it because Mojgani's words will be gone. Notice it because mine will be gone and yours will be gone and everybody else's words will be gone, too, and then we'll realize what we had. 

I'd tell you to not let them go, but I if I did that, you might never notice you were holding them. 

So let them go, maybe. Maybe then we'll notice.

"So much in these few words."

All my love,

Addy

P.S. Megan B: www.weheartit.com -- try it. Good pictures. Great pictures. And also dumb pictures, but it's worth sifting through.

Excuse me, Jane?

To write something good must've been so much easier 200-some-odd years ago, don't you think? Because 200 years ago, no one had penned the words, "It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen," or "All this happened, more or less." In fact, at that point, no one had even written, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of good fortune, must be in want of a wife."


200 years ago, you had nothing to live up to. You had nothing to be compared to. The dictionary had only been out for a couple of centuries, so you didn't even have to spell everything correctly, really. Did editors exist? I'm pretty sure they didn't, and if editors didn't exist, you didn't have to do anything right or go through a long, exhausting process in which some well-educated, well-read, uppity businessperson (not that there is anything wrong with being well-educated, well-read, uppity and having an MBA) said things like, "This chapter isn't exactly adding anything to the story, so we're going to cut it," and you didn't have to agree, especially if you were in love with that chapter that wasn't exactly adding anything to the story, because editors didn't even exist yet, I don't think.


Writing wasn't the only easy thing 200 years ago. No one had to reply to text messages from people they didn't like or worry about gas prices. They got to go running through fields to reply to letters! I'm all for advancements in technology, but I'd have no objections to running through fields, replying to letters from people I might marry sometime soon.


(I obviously don't have an editor to tell me that that last paragraph wasn't adding anything to my post. (Because it wasn't.))


Anyway.


The point I'm getting at, though, is this one: At some point, somebody did sit down and write "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth," and somebody did sit down and write, "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show," (see what I did there?) and somebody did sit down and write, "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."


Somebody did sit down, and somebody did write those things, and somebody did it because somebody was inspired, sitting there one day, thinking, "This is not for you."


Somebody wrote it. Somebody wrote it, and somebody's words were embedded in platinum and heralded as a classic.


Somebody wrote it. Somebody wrote it, and maybe that's what's important.


Somebody wrote it. Somebody wrote it, and who are we not to be that somebody?


Carrots help us see much better in the dark.
All my love,
Addy

Re: Stacks.

Everything I tell you has this awful little lie as an undertone, you know that, right? If you noticed the incredible literary tactic there, I'd stop using it.


And then I felt like everything was right in theory, but in real life, it was oh-so-wrong.

This is not a post.

Well, guess what. My words don't work. I keep thinking the words, "neon cats," and I don't know why. Neon cats.

Also, apparently 16-17 year old honors track students don't know what "prose" is. Neon cats.

Technically, it's still summer, so technically I can still pull the whole "sunglasses-instead-of-eye-make-up" number, right? Neon cats.

Happy school. I'm going to throw up soon. Neon cats.

I mustache you a question. Neon cats.

All my love,

Addy

...neon cats?

Cats? I think yes.

Woah. Woah. Wait.


I need this phone.


I need more cat related things in my life.


You are a footnote, I think.
All my love,
Addy

It's complicated.

I'd prefer it if my dreamcatcher would catch all of my dreams now; I'm growing steadily more exhausted upon waking up and realizing everything is much more complicated than I dreamt it was.

Do figure yourself out and let me know once you have done so.

Lumos.

All my love,

Addy.

P.S. See the smart girls picture? It nearly killed me to put it up 'cause it's punctuated all wrong. It should go like this: "So dumb guys go for dumb girls, and smart guys go for dumb girls. What do the smart girls get?"

That will be all.

My slow and delicate decent into spinsterhood.

I am fifteen and seven twelfths of a year old and I am giving up on love. I've had my shots and my opportunities, but nothing has ever worked out in my favor. I've never even been kissed and I find this positively wretched, unfortunately.

So I've decided that unless loves breaks down my front door and falls at my feet and pleads for me, my future will contain cats.

I've decided I shall have 21 cats. 14 of them are named after notable women in history, such as Susan B. Anthony and Ginger Rogers and Elizabeth Blackwell; one shall be named Anne-Sophie Mutter (because she's awesome), another shall be called Alexander McQueen, you know, because he was sufficiently incredible, and another shall be named Fluffy - because every deserves to have a cat named Fluffy. The final four shall be named George, Paul, John, and Ringo in tribute to the fab four.

I shall begin wearing unflattering, unbecoming, oversized holiday sweaters all months of the year. I shall obtain a fanny pack that is not ugly enough to be funny; yet, not cute enough to be cute - just really, really ugly; I shall carry tampons and dollar bills and other small trinkets in this really, really ugly fanny pack of mine. I will reject any heated tools used to do my hair. I shall watch Bosnian soap operas all hours of the day and night.

This universe has sent me a sign. This is the future it wants for me. If you want to save me, send a cardigan-wearing or sweater-clad boy who enjoys books and libraries and European chocolate and doesn't mind matte lipstick or turquoise rainboots or dancing in public places. Send him to break down my front door and battle each and every one of my cats.

He had better be an exceptional kisser.

All my love,

Addy.

P.S. If you're sending a boy, he also needs to have nice hair and nice skin and nice teeth and be very skinny. But not skinner than me. He also needs to understand politics. And fashion. And not mind my cats, because they're staying.

P.P.S. And if he doesn't fit these specifications, you should probably just forget about it.