lady_a raze tall. quirky. considerate. a surprisingly good handshake — surprising because few people seem to invest anything in a handshake anymore, regardless of gender. likes frogs. plays violin. ambidextrous. has no idea how to attach a youtube video to an email. while cooking, she found a potato that looked like an old man with a cleft lip, so she gave him eyes and named him chester. i like her. she's fun. 130309 ... raze she emailed me a picture of a lobster, just_because. "i drew him a while back and he got lost," she said. "so when i found him i named him raymond." 140514 ... raze she baked me shortbread cookies with green sprinkles in a dream last night. i didn't get to try them, but they looked good. 140515 ... raze she's playing in an eight-piece band. i still have the tea she gave me. "you know what they say," she said. "friends don't let friends cut their hair." 140516 ... raze she sent me another picture she drew. this one is called "the mosquito who robbed red cross". 140522 ... raze she's dealt with some toxic people but says she's working on developing her "bitch bone". i've been working on making music with shavings from mine. played her a dreamy mood of a song with words that don't always sound like words, and she liked it more than i thought she would. maybe she'll play violin on it. her bike is named for the sound it makes. her hair is fire. it hasn't been short since she was a child. she said you could use it to find her if she ever went missing. just follow the fire. 140525 ... raze today's drawing is called "the pickle with flirtatious eyes". she's got a look that says, "i know you want to know all about me, but a pickle's gotta have some secrets." and haven't we all known a pickle or two like that? 140526 ... raze she rode her bicycle here, in air so thick and muggy you could almost trip over it just walking onto your porch. i'm not sure how she made it here without sweating half of herself away. she wanted to play violin on this dreamy, drifting little mood piece of a song with lyrics that are intentionally almost impossible to make out. she isn't a hundred percent comfortable with improvisation yet. i sketched out a rough idea of some notes to circle around, so it would be half written, half improv. a sustained g all on its own sounded so good it was insane. we did about half a dozen takes, i layered the two best ones, and whatever the song might have been missing, she filled it in and it's there now. it was the first time she'd ever recorded anything in something resembling a proper studio setting. i'd say she knocked it out of the park. she drew a dog-cat on my wet erase board, but i need to wipe it clean and write new things on it. i'll have to ask her to draw me something new when i do. she played my hammered dulcimer with her bow and made horror movie sounds, and then she hugged me when she left. it was quick, because neither one of us wanted to make it awkward, and i didn't want to invest too much in it after what happened with the last person i got in the habit of hugging goodbye. but it was a solid hug. 140629 ... raze i described that same song the same way already with some words that were different and some words that were the same, didn't i? yeah. i did. well, i never claimed not to be redundant. so there's that. 140629 ... raze i told her the next time i saw her i'd be wearing my greeting socks. they look just like normal socks, but they're secretly always saying hello. i hope it made her snicker a little. 140724 ... flowerock I bet she did. that's the_right_kind_of_funny in my opinion. I'd laugh, and be sure to greet your socks next meeting. 140724 ... raze haha! my socks would thank you for your thoughtfulness. 140724 ... raze my greeting socks were beige, it turned out. i showed them off and they said hello. she was wearing a really pretty yellow dress. i was wearing a shirt with my name on it from almost twenty years ago, that i found while cleaning_out_the_garage last summer. it must have been down to my knees when it was first given to me in the fifth grade with the signatures of all my classmates on the back. now it's a perfect fit, and it doesn't look like it's aged a day. so i get to wear a long-forgotten piece of my past when the mood is right. i wonder how many of my friends from back then still have their shirts. we were supposed to play some music. instead we ended up talking for more than five hours. it's nice to just exist in the same space as another person sometimes. we came up with a theoretical drug for douchey people who are trying to reform. not-be-a-dick-a-sil, we called it. there was also a little running joke about a troubled, brooding pair of salad tongs moonlighting as a masked vigilante named tong man. his one weakness: carrots. she smells so good it's almost a little unnerving. i don't know if it's her shampoo, or her perfume, or what, but i've never smelled anything quite like it. she lent me a book about dreams, but it didn't pick up her scent. it doesn't smell like anything at all. it's got a cool picture on the cover, though. 140726 ... e_o_i (That sounds cool. Spending good time with cool people, and also wearing old clothes with personal memories... I have a T-shirt from the 1996 Montreal Jazz Festival - my mom got it for me when I was eight, but it was in an adult size, so I didn't start wearing it until years later.) 140726 ... raze (i don't know what it is, but there's something i really like about the idea of old clothes that never really got old because they were always way too big to wear, and how, if we hold onto them, we end up growing into them. so there's the history and memories they carry with them, but at the same time, they somehow feel brand new. it's like a metaphor for something! maybe. ish.) 140726 ... raze now she works behind the meat counter at the place we get most of our food from. she made a joke about fish. i did not make a joke about sausage. 170613 ... raze the fire is gone. her hair is brown now. she thinks she isn't any good at playing the violin after fourteen years of trying hard. what she doesn't see is how much good there already is in her. 210913 what's it to you? who go blather from