Don't Give Away the End

I wish I had stuck with my piano playing a little more. I could have actually been pretty great. I stopped taking lessons in 7th grade because I didn't have time between all the soccer teams I was on, and now when I sit down and play it's like trying to reinstate an old habit you've already kicked. It takes so long to remember how my fingers are supposed to move, and before long my pinky finger cramps up and I need to take a 10 minute break until it regains mobility. But sometimes I'll sit at my keyboard and let lots of songs flood my head and before I know it, my fingers have a mind of their own and they're dancing around the keys, mimicking the great melodies in my head with expert ease. I don't know how that transition happens, but I can't really duplicate it at will, it just happens. Maybe if I practiced more when I was first learning the instrument, I could have established that bond early on and avoided the annoying interum between warming up and kicking ass. Piano for me is like a lot of things in life... there's greatness lurking there somewhere, but my own lack of ability makes the effort to achieve that greatness a real chore sometimes.

I wish I kept in touch with my pen pal from Guatemala. When I was younger, my family did one of those "save a child" things where you donate a few bucks a week to some starving infant across the world and as a thank you, you get pictures of how the child is doing, health reports, report cards from school, etc. When I was 6 my pen pal, Marta Julia Bunchen Perez, was 8. I was intrigued by her photographs... she had very clear black eyes, even blacker hair, and unevenly tanned skin, but her smile was just magical. She would just slightly curl up the edges of her mouth, never showing teeth, but smiling this sly grin that was hopeful and cheeky at the same time. I would write to her all the time, just telling her about my every day goings-on. I remember it was the time when my family got their first good computer, so I would beg my mom to let me type a letter to Marta and sign it in pen at the end. They had a person in her village translate my letters for her, and she would respond in like, getting the same person to type up an English version of her Spanish text and shipping it off to me when it was all over. She would always include some kind of drawing with her letters... it was sometimes an original crayon drawing, other times magazine clippings all pasted together, sometimes a collage of stickers. But she always included something or other. I wrote to her for a few years, and we'd talk about pretty benign stuff -- school, sports, food, our hobbies, our family. But even though we never wrote about anything of real substance, I felt a serious connection to this stranger from a strange land, one I knew nothing about and couldn't even imagine. Then, like many things in my life, one day I just stopped. I got her letters but never found the time to write back. After a few weeks passed by, I remember getting a letter from her that ended with something like, "It has been a while since your last letter. I would like to hear from you." Nothing cruel, nothing serious, just a simple statement that was to the point and honest. I remember vowing to write her back, but for some inexplicable reason, it just never happened. Thinking back now, I don't know how many letters she continued to write me after that. But in retrospect, I'm kind of disgusted in myself for not feeling extremely guilty and awful about the whole thing. I kind of just let it slip by, not feeling any shame for being too goddamn lazy to type a paragraph to a girl whose entire month was made better by a few words from me. I wonder where she is now.. she's a woman by now, about 22 I think. I wonder if she has a job, if she found someone to love, if she's still living in the same dilapidated village as before, if her favorite color is still green. I wish to hell I had her address and could find an answer to all these questions. But I guess the burning curiousity and peculiar sense of loss is my load to bear for my actions.

I wish I could grow the balls to just cut my hair already. It's ridiculously long and looks like a tangled mess and the ends are so dead and frayed and unseemly. All I need is a quick trim, but for some reason I really don't want to. Have you ever noticed that when you ask a barber to "take off as little as possible," they always end up taking off a minimum of 2 inches and you're left to watch in horror as wet clumps of your hair go cascading to the floor around you like a brunette hairball hurricane. I really fucking hate that. I'm paying you to do something to a part of my body, why can't you just listen? Also, I've become pathetically more invested in my looks lately, which I don't really understand. I'm fine with my appearance, but now more than ever I find myself literally walking out of my way in order to catch my reflection in the windows of stores and stuff. It's sick and stupid and I don't know why I'm suddenly this appearance freak. But I have this compulsion to keep checking over myself that wasn't there before, at least not at this magnitude. I don't know if it's the fact that it's summer and therefore people generally weare less clothes, or if something set me off recently to make me feel insecure out of nowhere. But I am now on a quest to train myself to ignore windows, stop pretending to go to the bathroom so I can look in the mirror, and stop being such a dumbass idiot vain bitch of a person.

I have a lot of wishes, apparently. I won't ask if they'll ever come true, because I know at the end of the day, I control whether they do or don't. And that's the hardest pressure life will ever throw at me.

- LAP etc.