The 20's

Well, as of yesterday, I'm 20, and...

I actually feel 20.

Every other year (that I can remember), I haven't actually "felt" the age I'm turning until the following birthday. Didn't feel 15 until I turned 16, didn't feel 16 until I turned 17, etc. I suppose it might be a case of the "you don't know what you got til it's gone" phenomenon. It could also have been due to the fact that I wasn't really sure how I was supposed to feel at 16, until I spent a year experiencing that age, knew what "Juliana being 16" meant, and then suddenly it was gone.


20 and still a shameless dork and cool with it.

20, on the other hand, has been a long time coming. While I've complained plenty about wanting to skip it entirely and go straight to 21, this is actually kind of a momentous occasion for me.


20 and being totally candid...

I'm not entirely sure why. Sure, I can say it's the beginning of a new chapter, or a period of time society holds as one of exploration and discovery. But I start new chapters all the time, and the exploration won't be starting, just continuing.

Yet somehow, I find myself sitting up a little straighter, feeling a little more comfortable in my own skin, and, most surprising of all, living in the moment.

xoxo
Maralah


p.s. FINALLY, I've perfected tattoo #2. Getting the outline done sometime in the next couple weeks. Sohh exchiitedd. Aand pictures from yesterday in my beautiful, beautiful Santa Cruz.

Wish I Had Written This, CocoRosie

I had an English teacher my sophomore year of high school who is perhaps, to this day, the best teacher I have ever had. His name was Mr. Hanmer, and he had an unrivaled passion for words and stories.

He would read aloud to us in class (and act out all the parts), and one of the things I remember with the most clarity is when he would stop after a passage and exclaim, "God, I wish I had written that! Don't you wish you had written that?"

I was on Quora today (if you've never been there, gogogo), and in response to the question "What is the best passage you have ever read?":


“But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram


And I thought to myself, God, I wish I had written that!! Don't you? So insightful and poetic and beautiful. God god I wish I had written that.

Looks like I'm gonna have to go read Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.

And in other news:

COCOROSIE IS COMING TO SAN FRANCISCO!!!!

Looklooklook.

See in my head these girls can't possibly exist anywhere but in my own personal dreamworld. They are much too cool for this reality. I'm probably going to be that fan trying to touch them (or lick them or marry them).

SO EXCITED.

In honor:



xoxo
Maralah

Real Women Have Curves?

Be forewarned, friends, there is a lot of angry ranting and use of the word "I" in here.

It's the middle of the workweek, and as many with internet access often do, I've found myself strolling along aimlessly through the world wide web, stopping here and there for things like personality quizzes and video clips. La di da, etc etc, here's a clothing store, there's some makeup tips...

and then, on an article (which will remain nameless) about "the best so and so for your shape":

"Boyish frames should look for pieces with ultra-feminine frills, like ruffles, lace or eyelet fabrics to play up your girly side."

Ah yes. Ruffles, lace, and eyelet fabrics are universally girly, right?
And if you're a girl, but aren't shaped like a fertility goddess, well you'd better play up your girly side, sister, because how else are all the men going to know that you're fertile and ready to begin dutifully popping out babies for them?

Let's just say some serious anger began bubbling up inside me.


You're one of these shapes and you're locked in. There's the ideal one, right in the middle so you don't miss it.
This is far from the first time I've seen something like this. Create strategic curves with these lines and shapes, they say. Better get something with ruffles to give the illusion of bigger boobs, they advise. Sure, sometimes they say nice things like here's this cool thing you can wear because you don't have any unseemly bodily bulges to play down. Then, of course, you put yourself in the shoes of the ladies at the other end of the spectrum, who are essentially being told--with that overused word "curvy"--that they're fat. I suppose you can't really win in the ideal body game. But for today, I'm focusing on the side of it that I myself am all too familiar with.

I don't really have curves. It's something I've been conscious of my whole life, since I was a little girl lying in my bed staring at my chest thinking, they'll be big someday, I'm sure. Middle school was spent waiting, and then realizing, horrified, that not everyone grew giant boobs. Throughout my teenage years I was reminded of my straight frame by my friends, pop culture, and most often, by the voice in my head.


A woman.

And then--the cherry on top--I entered into a three-year long relationship with someone who constantly made me feel as if I'd be perfect, if only I were more of an a hourglass. I was told--and these quotes are as direct as my memory allows--that if I had thicker thighs, wider hips, a bigger butt, and D cups, if only I had those, he would like me better. Plastic surgery was encouraged. I was even told I should gain weight (not muscle weight, fat weight) because, drawing from his extensive knowledge of how the human body works, he thought gaining 15 pounds would turn me into some kind of voluptuous vixen.


A little less of a woman.

I think it's safe to say that as a human being, and knowing myself, I'll probably never be *entirely* at peace with my body. The insecurities will pop up here and there. But really, guys, besides the physical benefits that come from working out (and maybe aside from the occasional hair dyeing), there's nothing I would change about my body now. It makes me me. And if someone can't accept me and love me for exactly who I am--nothing less, nothing more--then they're not worth my time. Period. No one is allowed to tell me that I'm any less of a woman because of my waist-to-hip ratio.


A ruler. Aka me; aka even less of a woman.

So when I see things like that ^, I get a knot in my throat and I feel like screaming, who the hell are you to tell me that if I don't have curves, I have to make up for it with ruffles?

Dear beauty website: I'll dress however I want to dress, and feel however the fuck I want to feel about it, okay? No, don't answer that. Because this isn't about you. It's about me.

I can go all cliche and say that we're all beautiful, beautiful is a state of mind, beauty comes from the inside, etc, but we're all familiar with those phrases. The campaign to redefine beauty has been going for a while now. But instead of doing that, I'm going to go ahead and "undefine" it. I'm not beautiful, I'm not ugly, because after all this, who knows what that means. I am the facts: I'm a woman, I'm myself. I don't need ruffles to attract a man, and I don't need to attract a man to be a woman. I don't need a website to tell me that I need to dress a certain way and do my hair just so and wear this makeup so I fit the archetype of what is, today, this year, in this ever-changing world, attractive.

I'll probably continue to read these articles. There's no doubting that they're often fun and entertaining. Sometimes I really am interested in knowing what shade of blush best complements my skin tone (the answer: the color your cheeks naturally are. It stunned me...).

But I will take everything with a grain of salt, and the knowledge that I love my body, my body does not define me, and I am what I am, regardless of how pop culture chooses to categorize me. I'm in my own category, as we all are. You are the curves of your body and lack thereof, and at the same time completely separate from them.

Hell, you are whatever you want to be. Don't listen to me; define yourself. Or, don't. It's all up to you.

xoxo
Maralah

ps. the images are from these nameless sites I'm talking about. not mine, don't own them, yadayada.

Sea Dreams

I miss the sands that give way under curling toes,
the glassy rolling of the tumbling tide
the sharp white shattering of crests on stone,
the kelp breathing life into worlds below,
the calm at the furthest reach of your eyes
innocently masking the churning of her icy depths,
and the otters, the seastars, the mussels, the clams, the permanent residents,
and the dolphins and whales, who pay us sweet visits.
I miss my ocean.
I miss Santa Cruz.
Take me home.
T minus two months.

Patterns in the Ivey

Before you say anything, I didn't misspell ivy. I'll explain at the end.

My dear, dear summer. It's a good thing the days are so long now, because now that I'm out of school, there's SO much I have planned for myself, and rising and resting with the sun works quite well with my internal clock and boosts my productivity like a millionfold.


A waking sunflower in my garden.
I started a couple posts over the last few weeks, but never actually got around to publishing them. The (if you know me) surprising reason: I'm actually busy from sun up to sun down. This chick, the girl who slept away most of her teenage years, now gets up with the sun. It's 9:30 and I've been up for two hours already; the only reason I have time to sit here and finally do this, when I should be at my internship half an hour away, is that my ride's car battery died. A blessing in disguise, I say.


And another.
I've had a lot of disguised blessings lately; things I never thought would work out, that I assumed would take a turn for the worse, and that ended up brightening my life to an extent I really only dreamed of. How fantastic is that?

But enough about big pictures and epiphanies; this post is for the walk I took yesterday.



I take walks for two reasons. The first is to have some quick 20-minute speed-walking bonding with my mother; this happens pretty often and usually results in some groceries being bought. The second, the kind I took yesterday, is for when I'm feeling particularly directionless.

I don't mean depressed, or confused, or even necessarily restless. And I don't mean directionless in a long-term, where-am-I-going-in-life way. It's much more internal. It's for when I need to expand my imagination, especially when I'm writing. These are inspiration walks, and inspiration simply for the sake of itself. There's a default amount of dreaming this girl needs to keep herself happy and feeling fulfilled from day to day.

I take these walks alone, and they often turn into little adventures. I only walked for an hour yesterday, and in that time I found a beautiful garden and a mysterious Outsider hobbit house by the creek.


The community garden.
Unbeknownst to me before this walk, my town actually has a public demonstration garden not three blocks from my home that houses various native plants and explains how to grow them in your own garden. It's maintained by the UC system (wooo) and also provides pamphlets on invasive plants (and what that actually means). Is this a common thing for cities to have?




A busy bee on a flower that looks like a rubber band ball.
Also in the garden, sitting innocently on this bench:



I've found that people often leave spiritual guides such as this one in places that inspire personal discovery. A while back I found this as well. While I'm not big on people imposing their religious views on others, I think that if you're going to try and spread the word about something of a religious nature, this is the way to do it. There if you want it and available to leaf through without any sort of commitment or judgement.

Finally, a hobbit-sized house (of a non-Shire-dwelling hobbit, obvs. Perhaps a Bree hobbit).



It's not immediately apparent, but that door is about four feet tall. I found this place two or three miles from my house, by the creek, which is down a little hill just behind it. My mother says it houses some sort of electrical system that powers some sort of water system somewhere...I don't know. I'll just keep on believing I have a hobbit family as neighbors.

And as for the title of this posting--a play on words, because my last name is Ivey, and well...I have behavioral patterns that I just talked about(jeez I'm so clever)--here you go:



Absolutely magnificent.

Off to start yet another ridiculously productive summer day. God I love this sun and this season.

xoxo
Maralah