Dream was onstage. They were beautiful and their voices were amazing and I wanted to be one of them. They were famous. And it was almost like I was famous, because we'd won the lottery; the public had voted for the best school, and North Andover Middle School won, and Dream was ours.

They're a four-person one-album-hit wonder. You might remember their song, "He Loves U Not." Or you might not. They sang pop, and just announced earlier this year that they're getting back together. Although they created two albums, only one resulted in success--the other seems to have flopped. Maybe the issue was its title: Reality. Reality sucks.

What caught my attention most about them, though, wasn't the music or the fame: it was their pants. Glittery, pretty, all different colors. They shimmered onstage, impossible to look away from. I wanted those pants.

I never felt like I belonged at N.A.M.S. It was a place where the wealthy went. All of my friends dressed well, and it seemed that most didn't wear hand-me-downs like I did, and they all acted so much older. Gabby and her twin sister had smooth dark skin and crimped hair. They were gorgeous and they knew it. They sneered whenever I dared to ask them a question, like, "What's for homework?"

Then there was popular, hott hott hott Radys (like "Radish" I joked with my friends) who was hispanic and maybe the only crush I've had on someone I've gone to school with.

At the time, I think I knew that I was at the bottom of the food chain, but that didn't hamper my self-confidence much--I just told myself that everyone who hated me was an idiot.

One year, there were tryouts for a band or singer or dancers to perform at the school dance. I knew I could sing, and I wanted to try. My mom has been singing all my life, and she has a wonderful voice. It's genetic. Tryouts happened in the cafeteria. It was empty except for a few kids, sitting at a lunch table, watching each group or person try out one at a time. I was terrified. But I reminded myself, I can sing, I'm good. I can do this. If they don't choose me, it's okay.

I sang my cute version of Merril Bainbridge's "Mouth," in my sweet, singsongy voice that was made for pop music (and later, country and blues) combined with my stand-there-and-don't-move dance routine. I didn't win. But I don't remember that knowledge bothering me much. I was too electrified by the anticipation and terror of performing acapella to be letdown. And I knew without doubt that I was brave to have tried.

At the dance where I did not win to perform, I asked Radys to dance. I thought he denied me, and I ran to the bathroom in tears. When I came out, my mom was at the door, waiting to pick me up, but Radys came right up to me and we started dancing. I found out that another girl had asked him to dance just before me. Dancing together meant moving your body while standing in close proximity to your partner. At least that's what we did. Mom waved me on at the door, but I ignored her as I danced the one dance I'd wanted all night long.

Watching Dream made me hope for things I never expected to have or even to want to have. That's how it's always been when I watch a famous band or hear a truly remarkable voice. I don't know how my mom can stand to watch American Idol. When a voice sends chills down my arms, I sense great power and happiness, and then this disolves into desolute need, like being near a hot guy with kissable lips, and I want it, and I know I'll never have it. And then I remind myself that I want the voice, not the lifestyle, so why should I carry so much envy? But do I tell myself that just because I know I can't have it?

It's an interesting conundrum. And maybe one without answer. But one thing I do know? I'm not a famous singer. I'm not even a great singer. But I'm not terrible, and I make my own money, and I have many other passions. And? I can buy those damn sparkly pants if I want to.

Some books straddle the border between Children’s and Young Adult. The Girl Who Owned a City is one such book. I was 11 or 12 when I found it. This was my first taste of dystopian fiction, although I didn’t know the name at the time. While it was a rather slim book, it was dense: a fatal disease kills off everyone who is 13 and older. The younger kids form gangs and prowl the streets for food, and there’s a lot of gore and violence in this story. While the other stories I’d enjoyed had mostly featured a person abandoning society, or abandoned by society, this one was rife with death and the need to move on from that death, to escape and survive.

A lot of outcasts feel like they need to escape their own troubled lives, and take hold of the runaway stories completely, thinking that, in a world like that, they might survive, because gathering food and finding shelter seems like an easier life than trying to explain how your brain works to other kids. Those of us longing to escape read books like Julie of the Wolves, (where a girl chooses to run with wolves instead of people), Number the Stars, (A popular children’s book about the Holocaust), and other runaway stories.

Loners tend to linger in shadows, sometimes with a book or headphones. I imagine this happens more and more with younger kids now, but when I was in elementary school, no one had an IPOD. We carried either a CD Walkman or some bulky MP3 player. But I didn’t have one; so books became my escape, and later writing would take me out of dire situations and into imagined ones instead.

I began writing my own runaway story, “The High School from Hell”:

Most of the lockers were opened with bags and stuff squeezed in so tightly the lockers couldn’t stay shut. I started to walk down the gum-chewed hallway, with sweat pouring down my face.
I finally found the office. All of the desks were painted green, and the paint was pealing on most of them. “Excuse me, could I help you with something? Aren’t you supposed to be in class right now.” Asked the lady behind the front desk.
It sounded more like a threat than a question; I turned to go but came back. “Excuse me” she said this time even ruder, “what do you want?”
-The High School from Hell

It is about a girl who runs away from her home with a guy she falls in love with, until he starts beating her, and she eventually leaves him to live by herself in an abandoned shack for weeks or months. Finally, I became bored with leaving her to her own devices, and brought some characters along to move in with her and cause havoc. Even the person I invented couldn’t live in complete solitude.

I began writing that story on my mother’s computer at home; I worked on it every day for the first two weeks of summer, before I was enrolled at the YWCA summer camp for girls, and by the time summer camp started, I had typed 50 or so pages of a story that I wished was real. The other girls at the Y all wanted to read it—they were drawn because I seemed to be so into the story, focus unwavering. So I read parts of it to them. I joined them in dancing and karaoke and playing house, and for once I didn’t feel the need to escape. Maybe it was because there were no boys around to compete with.

The YWCA was situated downtown, right next to Lawrence High, infamous for gang violence and the required use of metal detectors. We were living in a city where parents had to worry that their girls might not make it through high school (or junior high) without getting pregnant or otherwise maimed. The prevalence of male violence was clear everywhere we looked. And when the girls were violent, we blamed that on the guys too—cheating or daddy issues. We were victims. But here, surrounded by other girls, we could be who we were without needing to weigh gender on a constant basis.

The book My Side of the Mountain may not have been the first book I read, but it is the one that changed my life. It is a story about a boy who decides that he is going to live alone in the woods for a year. He tells his family—and they laugh at him, unbelieving—until he actually does it. He hollows out a tree to make his house, and makes acorn-pancakes for breakfast. He finds a falcon whom he names Frightful, and later, Frightful helps him catch dinner. It is a story about leaving home and choosing to be on one’s own. For many years, I thought that when I grew up, I would live as a hermit in the woods, far from people who I didn’t understand, and who didn’t understand me.

Like many kids who feel misunderstood, I spent a lot of time alone. Maybe being misunderstood turns into selfishness because it results in one’s focus only on self. Narcissism. This serves to only exacerbate the solitude, but maybe someone later in life will show the child how to get outside of his/her own mind in order to develop empathy and be able to interact with others. Some of us escape while others never get out.

 I've been serving birthday parties at the entertainment center for hours, I haven't made much, if any, money. When I approach the computer terminals at the end of the bowling lanes, the birthday party hosts are standing in a group. Erin is typing in their tips--they get tipped by the party--and I am bored out of my mind. Most of the hosts are 19 or younger, but Erin is probably in her twenties--early to mid, I'd guess. She listens to me. I know, because she has responded in the past.

"Is there something wrong with me that only girls hit on me here?" I ask aloud, hopeful that someone will hear the question. I've been here for three or four hours, with almost nothing to do, and thoughts can make a person go crazy after too much quiet. One of the girls, she is maybe 4'9" and dark-skinned, laughs without sound, or at least quietly enough that she cannot be heard over the raging birthday music in the background ("What's the Fox Say?" and today we are also playing "Oops, I Did it Again," and "The Way You Love Me," by Faith Hill). Erin is too busy to respond. "I mean, they offer to buy me shots, give me their numbers...why doesn't that happen with the guys?"

This happened at Cracker Barrel too. I had this table of three women, all overweight and mostly quiet. Two appeared my age or younger, in their twenties or teens. The one with highlights in her black hair kept glaring at me, and I was feeling a bit nervous. But when I returned, she had left the table, and the woman across from her seat handed me a folded piece of paper, saying, "My sister wanted me to give this to you."

Inside was a phone number. Apparently what I had assumed was glaring, were really looks of longing. I kept the phone number, as I kept all notes received from serving at Idaho Rocky Mountain Ranch, Olive Garden, Roosevelt Lodge, and now, the entertainment center.

I keep the notes and tack them up individually, on the bedroom wall where my calendar is. I am a note guardian. Some of these notes feel like secrets; but most are acts of humanity. They remind me that people can be kind, and that they are grateful, sweet, and giving. I have many religious notes, (Cracker Barrel is big on Christian visitors), telling me to find god if I haven't been saved, and some offering me warm food and a place to sleep, should I ever need it: Fellowship, it's called.

I even keep the angry notes, where people write what a terrible server I am, and what a horrible person. It isn't my masochism, or a way for me to laugh at them. I keep them, I think, because I want to acknowledge that they have spoken. I might not like what they say, but I have heard them. Maybe there is no one else for them to speak to, or yell at; maybe they work and live in places where they are silenced, and told that their thoughts and feelings don't matter. At the entertainment center, I understand this all too well. So I keep the notes. I listen.  

The man crossing the Golden Gate Bridge is carrying a staff with a bear carved into the top. The bear wears a serious expression: his mouth set in a straight line, eyes facing forward, skinny body straight like a man. The bear is cute. The man has flyaway hair, a nice complexion, and a backpacker's pack over his shoulders.

A thousand questions, I have. But I shouldn't ask--I'm in San Francisco on a solo mission of exploration. I don't want to talk to people, just watch and write and take pictures.

But I want to know his story.

"Hey," I say, "Where are you from? Where are you going?"

Meet Miguel. He has hiked roughly 808 miles from his home of Seattle, Wa. to here, good ole' San Fran. Once I start talking to Miguel, my solo trip in the city has all but ended. We go to the hostel on a great hill to find him a place to sleep, but there are no rooms available. We sit on the couch in the waiting room and he shares an avacado with bread and hummus with me. It's deliciously simple. We decide to explore some of downtown.

I show him the shop of lovely horrors, which I have fallen in love with. There are skulls of many sizes, and the little bodies of stuffed mice dressed in doll's clothes, standing in miniature kitchens, and sitting on doll couches.

Down the street, we find a gothic church whose steeples touch the sky, where the ceilings are so high as to make one's neck ache from leaning it back so far to see into the abyss. There are statues and stained glass windows, and it is dark. Miguel sits on the carved wooden chair, the back of it reaching to at least four feet about his head, and he appears regal with his dark beard and the staff clutched in his fist.

In the churchyard is a labyrinth. He leads as we walk from the outside inward. He tells me to focus, take my time, be at peace. Once we reach the center, we move from the inside out, going through it all over again.

Miguel has hiked most of his way here, taking rides from strangers sparingly. He left behind a good job to take this journey, to rediscover himself and what he wants out of life. The teddy bear staff was a gift from an old man, to protect my friend on his walk. He stayed with a woman in Portland, Or. for a few days, and she bought him a bus ticket to get him some of the way to where he is now. Later, a woman he stays with downtown will buy him another ticket to return to Portland. Miguel is on his way back to where he came from.

I'm hiking through Coyote Ridge, on my way back to the car. The Beatles or 30 Seconds to Mars are playing in my headphones while I think about class. When I'm almost to the bottom of the incline, I see, out of the corner of my eye, a snake just barely on the path. Its long gray-scaled body is curled up tight, and there's a thin rattle on the end of its tail. I am parallel to the snake when I notice it, and my foot is barely inches away.

I am a real believer that powerful concentration can be dangerous. I'm so good at noticing dusty blue butterflies in the grass, that I often don't realize the gray-scaled rattler by my feet. Twice now, I have almost stepped on a rattlesnake, barely noticing before it's too late. Luckily it was never due to examining a beautiful butterfly, but always I was elsewhere--in my head thinking thoughts or speaking them aloud to a friend. 

In nature, I can observe and remain quiet for hours. But sometimes, my mind goes on hamster-wheel, and my brain doesn't shut off. I go into deep thought about too many things at once and I can't parce out the one idea that would help me figure out what I actually want to say. For instance, for a large part of the writing of this essay, I thought it was about distractions. I was distracted by the very idea of distraction. I have great talent for connecting the jagged hogbacks in the distance with the rise and fall of my own emotions, the constant hesitation, the inability to step firmly in one place and stay there. The thoughts in my head are often debates: I am debating what I should say, how I should react, Who I should be, who I AM.

Obsession has always come easily to me. You know how, when a cat sees the flick of a feather, he can't resist the crouch and leap? Or when you come home, and the dog greets you, and her paws are on your chest, tongue trying to slobber you up because she missed you so much? That's what I have: zeroing in capababilities, the need to find a single object and research the hell out of it, so much, in fact, that I never want to think about it again. And currently, my living situation is like that: a constant concentration on copywriting and a mandatory two-hour block of writing every day (which doesn't happen every day). These are rules that I create for myself in an attempt to avoid getting too involved in just one area of my life and forgetting about the rest. 

If I don't make rules then I'll fall into the trap of over-concentration, where I focus on one supposedly brilliant idea and turn it over and over, searching for more brilliance. Eventually I realize I need to step outside of this magnified focus in order to see what I'm really looking for. (This is much how, if you are trying to remember a person's name and you just close your eyes and stop trying so hard, it sometimes comes to you.) Do you have a dangerous habit of over-concentration? It seems strange to consider it a bad thing, but if you think about it, the most passionate people are often the ones to get themselves killed. The guy from Into the Wild, the American poet Anne Sexton, and Marie Curie who died from her experiments with radiation, just to name a few. Passion is such a powerful emotion that logic seems to just disappear in its midst. Some people get stuck and are never capable of seeing any of the hundreds of other possibilities. 

When I saw the snake and recognized the rattle, I walked ten feet away, took some pictures, and started throwing rocks to scare it off. I didn't want another person, concentrating on their own ideas or music or conversation, to get bit just for thinking.