A storm of ineptness has ravaged my brain lately. I feel like I cannot accomplish anything, anything at all, like buying seeds to plant flowers. Like finishing a simple short fiction piece, or unpacking my fucking clothes from the tattered cardboard boxes that line the walls of my room. I feel like I cannot speak and I cannot write. I feel like I am floating aimlessly in this world, and despite how much I tell people I have enjoyed my three week vacation from school, work and reality, I have felt like a big bumbling moron fucking, fucking, fucking up. All I have been doing is exerting my body on bikes, in pools and on road runs, stopping only for a brief moment to stuff my face to refuel. The starches, the sugars, the fucking repulsive high fructose corn syrups, the lean proteins--- they all funnel into my work, work, working body. Never do they go to my brain. 

Although I am eating more than I used to--justifiable tonight only because I angrily swore to myself I would stay up to write--I feel that eire, powerful wave of emptiness rising up from the pit of my stomach. 

This time is for rest, for relaxation, for refuel, for sleeping until noon without parents hassling you. This is what I am supposed to think. I am supposed to be cool with not going out to bars with old friends. Without spending days lazily smoking bowls and going on epic adventures through the woods and taking dainty fairy steps to cross narrow streams. Without the beach. 

Without, with-

Without you. I am supposed to be so happy, so full. Alone. 

Really, it is not as bad as I've made it out to be. Really, I think I am extremely nervous to to start an internship.  

I do not care if I am not good enough for you, she thought, standing in front of her mother's bathroom mirror. She turns away from the mirror, bends down to quickly slather lavender lotion on her hairless legs, her thighs concave sacks of yellow flesh thrown over long bones. She sneaks a peak at the mirror behind her, and can see her hip bones proudly saluting the ceiling underneath her skin. Running up her back is a single-file line of vertebrae presenting  themselves like soldiers aligned for inspection. They hope to win her gaze too. 

Good enough for you? Hah, what a joke, she mused. She smiled. To reveal her pearly, only slightly crooked teeth. It looked as if a strong hand was pulling her skin from the back of her head, tightening the skin over her face. Like the hand was ready to scalp her. A veil of clear gloss lay on her lips, normally fraught with white from the cold summer breeze, or chapped from snarling winter winds. 

Good enough for you? Tonight I am good enough for me, she lied and licked her bottom lip. The assurance invigorated her.  She turned slowly to the side, like a suspect in a police line up. She shot another glance at the mirror and sucked in hard. Her stomach retreated and she put her hands on her hips and I am doing this for me. She pulled up her skin tight jeans and I am doing this for me, no one else. She smiled. Her eyes laughed deep green pools and knife sparkles.  

Friday

Today is Friday, but it does not feel like it. 

Fridays are beach bonfires and a six-pack of BudLight tall boys. Fridays are long, slow drinks of sunshine and wafts of barbecue, jean shorts and lazy sessions of porch-smoking. Fridays are bike rides and lifetime movies playing in the background while figuring out what outfit to rock. 

Today is a bleak cloudy sky, a roar of traffic whipping around the s-curves of I-5.

Today is an wise old blue comforter drenched in rain water left out on the patio last night, deflated and threatening to mold right there on the cement. 

Today is a strange, strange Friday.

Fridays laugh and run. 

Today snarls 

His wrinkled face cringes and he spits out a senile warning: "don't come out here."

Fridays are scrambled eggs and salsa and orange juice.

Today is branflake, fiber-pumped cereal. 

Welcome!

Hello there, my name is Katie. 

I am a woman, a writer, a sister, a Pacific Northwest loyalist, and a leaner. I am a Fuji Apple fanatic, a lover, a thrill-seeker, a collager, a coffee fiend, a listener, an aspiring world-traveler, a runner, a storyteller and a fighter. 

More or less in that order. 

An awesome turn of events has led me to claim this tiny comer of cyberspace as my own. Mostly, my junior year of college came clamoring to a hault, and a great number of my seemly "important" commitments--going to classes, writing papers for these classes, pedaling my heart out on my trusty Ironhorse bicycle up Pine St. to get to campus on time to catch a professor, flag her down and shove these papers under her office door mere moments before said professor peaced the fuck out for summer, etc.-- have all dissipated. Left with few places to be and even fewer "important" things to do, I have decided, or rather pledged, to carve out a small chunk of every single lazy, lemonade-drenched day this summer to practice the one ritual that has long frustrated and ignited me. 

I decided to write. 

To be honest with you, I have been writing all my life. As soon as I learned how to craft letters, I started scribbling in purple jelly-ink pens all over the pages of pink glittery My Little Pony journals.  I continue to journal like a madwoman today.  Although my handwriting remains an illegible scrawl, my journals have since morphed into stacks of boring 79-cent spiral-bound volumes of college-ruled notebook paper. 

Still, I wanted to try something new this summer. I wanted to share my writing with the rest of the cyberworld, showcase my vulnerability to any friends and family who happen to stumble into my little abode on the net.

I also wanted to be cool. It was high time, I reckoned, to get my hands dirty playing with this newfangled blognology. And seeing as I already had a facebook and a twitter, blogspot offered me one final online frontier to explore.

So here I am, and here I will stay all summer, scribbling at you in Times New Roman. Here I will tell stories, and some of them may even be true. Here, at Katie’s Spot. 

Please do come again. 

I will be cooking up many goodies to share.