Ah cones. meghan participated in her very first coning, with one cone obtained from st joe's courtesy of northeast utilities, that evil corporate entity. we coned jess' doorstep, out of a lack of other west hartford residents. we also bemoaned our lack of things to do several times. we honked at some cute bongo drummers. meghan says i make her a bad driver! i also stole two more cones on the way home and coned melissa...i heard caesar and cleo go crazy inside so i skedaddled. and here i be. i read rae's blog today....i so understood so much of what she was talking about...college is going to be a weird transition, and everyone's telling me not to go into it with a boyfriend either. i also spend time thinking about how we'll adjust to bein separated, and if we'll grow apart, and if we shouldnt just cut it short right now and save ourselves the trouble. sigh. i don't know the answer, really, but i have such a problem with the idea of saying "gee honey, the last year or so's been great, and i do love you, but....for my convenience, we should just break up right now." jessi advised me to tell him that we'd date when we "had the chance". ummm...how does one reconcile loving someone part of the time and seeing other people at other times? it's like annie and pace. they broke up because they moved apart, they were'nt on the same track....yet they loved each other? did their love wane, and that led to the break? did they still love each other, and let thei environments pull them apart? i guess since i've never loved anyone before i don't know how it will end. i know people love multiple people in life, i know greg is my "first love", the one i'll remember with teary eyes twenty years down the line...but how do first loves end? where is that line, and will i know when we have tiptoed across it?

Tonight was fun...after an excruciating day of work (fucking allergies!) and an equally excruciating family dinner, i went to khara's house for some good old fashioned coning entertainment. no coning actually occured, however. we got ice cream and they all wanted to go gallivanting, which fo them means driving into a cornfield and stealing whatever corn they can grab through a window. personally, i think that's wrong, because corn is somebody's produce and you're basically stealing money from them. cones are not anyone's livelihood, hence they are fair game. (i also never take cones from personal property or when they are placed to warn people of something hazardous. it's just not cool.) so i volunteered to go pick up brian from northwest with flanny. by the time we reunited with the rest, they had kidnapped jesus and brought him to khara's. jesus is actually danny, a friend of melissa's who used to have long hair like jesus and once was photographed in a Last Supper pose. yarr. anyway so we were going to make a movie about coning with mel's video camera, and we went to mecca, where we procured ourselves an exit sign, which later got placed on the front steps of khara's next door neighbor kevin. unfortunately, khara managed to shut jess' hand in the door of her car, so we rushed her to doctor flanagan for medical treatment. he gave her some frozen peas to put on it. then we wound up at khara's once again to watch labryinth. i only stayed until the dancing scene. it's not that great of a movie when you're tired and your eye is killing you. oh, and khara's brother brian is utterly hot. he looks like david boreanaz. damn. khara tells us she's used to all of her friends lusting after him, so it's ok to vocalize in her presence. heather and i still exchange meaningful looks from time to time, though.

sara is still away. greg is at camp (evil memories, "the scarlet temptress"!). i will be car-less thurs and fri. going to MA this weekend. bummer. next week" NO SISTER! WOOHOO!

m binky emerged from his hiding place and ate something! yay! he's not going to starve to death....i love cleo already...i have never encountered a more affectionate and adorable creature. just don't look at her face too closely.

Well, they're here. Michelle's new kitties have descended. My dog is currently terrorizing the one that was foolish enough to run for it. Sheena's like the t rex in jurassic park--you don't move, she doesn't seem to know you're there. The runner is CleoBob, an ugly, mangy, squashed-face little while and gray furred thing. Monica gave the unfortunately long-haired creature a haircut before its departure. anyone who saw the catastrophe visited on my dog by this same girl and a pair of scissors will know that this is not a good thing. the other one is male, mr binky. he is, at 11 pounds, a hefty animal (we havent had a fat kitty since pepper died), but a handsome one. he has very soft blue-grey fur and blue eyes. i've never had a cat with blue eyes before. he also has asthma. unfortunately, he was abused as a kitten and can be very vicious; monica warned me that he'd "claw me to death" if i alarm him or pick him up. hmm....who does this sound like? perhaps our own half-feral bonnie, who used to seize onto people's ankles asthey climbed the stairs? he's big enough to be a little scary...when monica tried to introduce him to sheena, he showed his true colors and took a flying leap from monica's shoulder, claws fully extended, onto the unsuspecting knees of yours truly. OW OW OW OW. my kitties never claw me. cinnie barely has real claws. this cat has DAGGERS. poor mini-mon, she's still nesting peacefully in her grocery bag downstairs (she's recently showed a renewed predilection for paper as she did in her youth). she has no idea. neither does my precious tux, who's running around outside, happy and free....argh. i don't WANT THESE CATS!! i'd like binky if he weren't vicious, but i will never like that wimpy, ugly cleo. sigh....time to go

Hooray for crosswords!! Michelle got her AP test scores today.....*drumroll please*.....and she scored a FIVE on both biology and english! oh yeah, baby, that's right, who kicks academic ass? that'd be me, right here. it was amusing to look at the sheet at see the row of numbers: 5---5----5---1 : the one being from my infamous physics exam, of course. to think that i once worried, however briefly, that that one failure would significantly affect my chances of getting into a good college. it's just as silly as the fear that plagued me much of second semester, that i would somehow get in trouble at fairfield if i got a C or a D in math class. please. they don't give a shit. of course i know this now, but then it was a near-constant nagging worry, even after i decided to give up the ghost in math.

also ironic to recall how much stress went into my preparation for biology, how much information i was sure i needed to cram into my mind, how much i was certain i would never retain. amazing that i managed such a good score without having reviewed photosynthesis or cell resp; i skipped every question pertaining to them because i just hated them so much i didn't want to study them! also amazing, how certain i was that i hadn't done well at all, how i spent at least a week convinced i would get a two and thus shame myself in front of mrs haglund and all her previous high-achieving students, how i was seriously expecting a three or at best a four until i opened the letter. and most amazing of all? how the entire ordeal of AP exams, on which we placed such emphasis the entire year, has faded from my mind. it seems so far removed now, two months later, and all our efforts seem slightly antic. i had trouble recalling for my mom exactly why we had determined that this exam was the hardest in recent memory for bio exams (i finally remembered, because of those demon essays and that unexpected lab question!) ....as for english, i was pretty much expecting that. i actually enjoyed the test, despite writing till the point of exhaustion for two hours. it was an interesting mental exercise for me, trying to answer the questions fully and well and also trying to make it interesting, because i always try to make my essays and papers interesting to the reader. i try to never be dry and humdrum and spout just the necessary phrases...i always tried to pretty things up a little. the only place i foudn that definitely didn't work was bio. no prettying up an essay on ecology or evolution. actually i tried to do that in the beginning, only to wind up with a lot of red marks from mrs haglund instructing me to dispense with unnecessary phrases and lead-ins and get right to it. it flies in the face of all our english teaching, it does...

i will now return to my crosswords. hooray!

As fate would have it, I AM working with the IQ-challenged Jamie for the next month. Woohoo.

Greg told me last night that his pal Ted, who used to go to Berklee school of music, might be able to get us tickets for a certain band who is playing there in August...a certain PERFECT CIRCLE!!! of course now i'm dying to go even though i previously had no knowledge that they would be there. plus i'll be up there sthat weekend anyway to see my family, so i thought maybe i could just bring greg along and finally introduce him to various relatives. you can't buy tickets online, though, so it seems that ted is indeed the only shot we have of ever getting tickets. there's no way my mom would let us drive to new york city to see them there....OI

Tonight was nice...I went to greg's house after work and we went to the diner. He's not working at that stupid company anymore! they set all their temps free! woohoo! yipee! hurr---i mean, oh my that is just so sad. the poor boy. gee.

"Sacagawea?!"
"'Twas!"

and the moon was delightfully yellow and very low in the sky, too...a delicious cheese just out of reach.

damn i'm grumpy. i had to go to an eye appt at 9 this morning and i was there an hour and fifteen minutes, for an entire fifteen minute examination. now i'm up for good...and what do i have to do? not too much. i should probably read my summer reading book, which i think is still in the car....last ngiht i read a play by albert camus, "caligula". it was the story of the roman emperor caius caesar, whom everyone called caligula or "bootsie" because he'd spent much of his early life in military camps. after his beloved drusilla dies (she happened to be both his sister and his mistress), caligula, who has till then been a model ruler, realizes that life is imperfect and that that sucks: "Men die, and they are not happy." Caligula has a crazy scheme of logic by which he plans to achieve impossible things, overturn the entire world, and become greater than the gods he becomes Chance and Fortune, distributing favors where he pleases and death is great swathes throughout his kingdom. he commands utterly and then he contradicts himself utterly, just for the hell of it. "There's no understanding fate; therefore i choose to play the part of fate. I wear the foolish, unintelligble face of a professional god....any man can play the lead in the divine comedy and become a god. all he needs to do is harden his heart. " he decides to use his freedom as emperor in a way no man has ever done, to give himself no boundaries. He orders the random deaths of eery landowner in the empire; he takes people at their word when they vow to sacrifice themselves for his well-being; he closes the public granaries to create a famine. Caligula desires the moon, the most impossible (to him) thing of all....of course Caligula's subjects aren't totally pleased with this, and plot to kill him, because as Cherea says "He is converting his philosophy into corpses and--unfortunately for us--it's a philosopy that's logical from start to finish. And where one can't refute, one strikes." Caligula doesn't seem to care, and doesn't even punish the ringleader, Cherea, when he has evidence against him. In fact he destroys it and declares his foremost enemy innocent, releasing him to continue his plans. He claims to love life, but in doing all the things he does he is basically setting himself up for death and he knows it. he has an armload of knives delivered to a roomful of conspirators. he makes them him enemies knowing on some level what they will do, and he accepts it, desires it....Camus called it a "super-suicide". he didn't do it himself, but he caused it all the same. of course they kill him in the end, but as they are stabbing him the last line of the play is caligula crying/laughing "I'm still alive!"

I'm not sure how much of that made sense, but it was a very thought provoking play. Definitely let me see the dark existential side of Camus. We talked about it endlessly in english with lynch, and i remember how many existentialists spoke of the "absurdity" of existence, and that was something that was mentioned in the play several times, the absurd roles that people play in life. i think i remembered it because i thought absurd was a strange term to use to describe life....although i always understood how sex would be considered absurd. all the emphasis we put on it in society, all for a few minutes of strange contortions and facial expressions. very odd.

Heather and i went to the harry potter sermon at rae's church yesterday. it was cool...the homily made a lot of sense, especially when the minister noted that people in our own lives can be dementors, in that they make us terrribly unhappy, and that you always have to remember the better days. several people were in hp garb, and someone even brought a broomstick, and there was even a sorting hat! oh and they did a "sharing of the sweets", when everyone ate a bertie botts bean. the hymns the uu uses are a lot better than catholic hymns, in my opinion...they actually have more of a message in them than "god is great, we love you jesus". i found out that heather's church services are an hour and a half long! jesus! and i though 45 minutes was a pain in the ass. heather and i had lunch at friendlies, where we saw brittny, ashley w and kate thorner, and we walked for a bit. i went to work and found out the annoying artsy girl i work with is getting fired because she brought vodka to work on friday night in a water bottle. i'm not entirely surprised, she struck me as sort of out of it. very nice dresser, but she wasn't any fun to work with, not like kate. actually they can only fire her if she doesnt quit first, since she got a role in a "small, very experimental independent film" that aparently has no plot because they're allowed to make up whatever they want. one of the waitresses was of the opinion that she's actually starring in a porno lol. i guess she's a lesbian, since she introduced her friend to joann and jen as her girlfriend...this girl looked like she was so stoned. anyway i won't miss having to have her around, but i worry that i'll get jamie, who is none too bright. apparently she was in a car accident that left her a little off in the head, but that's no excuse for being lazy, and she definitely is. she can't seem to grasp her own schedule, so there's been several nights where three hostesses come in instead of two, and jamie's always the one who demands to be allowed to go home. she also managed to call out nine times in the first month she worked there. she only works three nights a week, so nine out of twelve shifts her very first month. i've never worked with her, but i had to train her one day, and i was praying that she wouldn't get put on shift with me. thankfully tonight i fly solo! ok enough of me complaining about work, i'm sorry, but this is what we do and i'm no better than any of the rest! :-)

ps Johnny depp is a golden god

I wrote this a night or so ago when my computer was acting up yet again (now looking eagerly forward to new laptop in september even more!):

Rae noted today that I haven’t updated this thing in a while. Right now I’m in a nice typing mood, warm fingers, despite my sister’s obnoxious presence nearby talking loudly on the phone. Side note—she’s going to PA for like a week! Yippee!! A lot has been going on lately, I guess. Meghan’s currently in Washington, DC at her orientation. Tomorrow is the Harry Potter sermon at Rae’s church that heather and I will be attending. Sara is moving into her new house in west Hartford on Thursday. She had a tag sale today to get rid of crap, which was not entirely successful. Hopefully we’ll be camping out in the unfurnished house before she moves in…whee, what an adventure!! Ashley was in Virginia but I think she might be home now. I saw Pirates of the Caribbean, and Johnny Depp was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. And I’m not even saying that just because he’s so orgasmically beautiful and I want to have his children (which is a hell of a statement coming from someone who hates children). He was truly funny in the movie, the way he portrayed his sea captain as a slightly mad, rollicking drunk. I have to see it again! Oooh and we saw a preview for Tomb Raider 2—Sara and I had to hold hands. It’s beautiful. I know most people think the movies don’t have much merit, lacking a strong plot, but personally I think this is one of the cooler action franchises. Hello, it stars a woman, and she’s the first female action star to come without a male lead! Halle Berry will have her own Jinx movie soon, but it’s Angelina Jolie, weird as she is, who led the way. She didn’t even get laid in the first movie, which is almost unthinkable in a traditional male-dominated action movie: think the Die Hards, Lethal Weapons, the Transporter, the James Bonds, the Arnold movies, even some of the Stallone movies! Plus she kicks ass, role model, all that (aside from the thievery, destruction, and violence). I look forward to it with glee. Almost more than I look forward to the new LOTR or the Matrix….
So Rae’s roommate is a former resident of Scottsdale, AR and a resident Canuck. Out go the “Canadia” jokes and “eh”. Ah, Scottsdale. The little suburb that could…spread like a freaking virus! I remember us driving around on the bus and every few minutes a sign would appear: “Welcome to Phoenix!” “Welcome to Scottsdale!” “Now Entering Phoenix!” “Now Entering Scottsdale!” It was like holy shit, make up your minds. Who decided that towns should resemble puzzle pieces? Then again, Scottsdale was also the place where Taliesin West was located. I have mixed opinions about that. For a man with no architectural education, Frank Lloyd Wright did some amazing stuff. I loved the water everywhere, the wind tunnel was amazing, and the acoustics in the chillingly red theater were great (kudos to Conor for challenging the guide on that point and getting totally shot down). I didn’t like his idea of “contained space”, which meant he would force you through a small, oddly shaped doorway or passage only to be “released” into a room with greater space. He was not even a short guy! Slanting lines everwhere, lots of geometric shapes. I remember a walkway and a small pond with a little window; he calculated so that one day a year, the sun would shine directly through the tiny space of the window and light up the whole long square pond. The fire breathing dragon was a nice touch. Concrete slabs with jagged rock poking out, not cool. Weird Technicolor furniture, also not cool. He was afraid of fire, deathly afraid of the way it could come raging across the dry, flat land with nothing to stop it. He used grass, sand, rock and water to created barriers all around his home/college/studio. He fought the government to prevent the placing of electrical and telephone wires because they polluted his view. When I think of a beautiful view, I imagine what we could see from the church in the rocks in Sedona. I can understand why he’d not want it contaminated by modernity.
I suppose it’s good that I’m writing about it, since I never finished my journal entries. Sort of left it on a bad note. There have been nights when the air was just the right temperature, warm but not really warm at all, and a slight breeze is up, that I feel as though I’m back in Phoenix on that last night when Ashley and I walked around the verandas for hours and stroked a yellow Mustang. I have felt a sadness a few times, most poignantly when I looked at a picture of Mr. T that I took on our last day of class. I loved Mr. T, he was like the father figure of our strange family, and now it’s over, something that I wasn’t really glad to have when I did have it, but I think this is just a symptom of me missing something bigger, not HILL, not Northwest, but the era of my life that is a swiftly closing door. It’s coming now, college. I’m not afraid of it, not nervous about it; I know I’ll make friends, adjust, love it. But the fact remains that I will necessarily abandon Michelle the High Schooler and adopt instead Michelle the College Kid. She is different, she is older, she has the wisdom of her predecessor yet so many more freedoms and opportunities. And of course so much more time to love, to suffer, to learn. One Michelle’s time is almost up, and I feel sorry to say goodbye to her, after all she has been through and all she has done for me. I don’t know when I said goodbye to Michelle the Child. I probably assumed she left the day I hit thirteen, but in reality I think it was about a year and a half later. I think the Child jumped ship the day my father died. She couldn’t handle it. The new incarnation of me handled it, and grew and became so amazingly evolved from the one I had been. Is this making sense? I look forward to being the college kid, I look forward to the future and I don’t regret the past. A part of me that is not crying still wants to hold on a little bit longer. I recognize that we are all in such a hurry to move on and grow up. This is possibly the last time we can cry naivete of the world and be at least in some respects innocent. When I’m eighteen I’ll have to remember not to assume that Michelle the Adult has miraculously assumed command. I think it will take a few more years before such a thing is true. At that time, I hope that I am still friends with the wonderful people I am today, that greg and I still care, and that I am ever-evolving toward what I must ultimately become.

Apparently with no surprise
To any happy flower
The frost beheads it at its play
In accidental power.
The blond assassin passes on,
The sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another day
For an approving God.

Emily Dickinson

Found poem


This is a found poem.
I discovered it as I was shifting aside
some boxes of junk in a closet.
I moved a stack of photo albums
(which were quite dusty from disregard)
and there it was on the floor.
It lay there so limp and motionless
I wasn’t sure if it was still alive,
so I grabbed a yardstick and poked it a little,
not too hard, just enough that it wiggled
and gave a faint little crinkle
of its paper, as if to let say
“I’m here! Don’t throw me away!”
I was relieved; the thought of finding
that a poor, defenseless poem
had been crushed to death
by the weight of all my memories
would have been too much too bear.

But there it was, safe and sound
and looking haler by the minute,
even more so after I gave it a cup of tea
and a biscuit, to regain its strength.
It looked at me with such gratefulness
and made such endearing rustlings
that I could not help but love it, right away,
and I became very glad that I had thought
to clean out the closet that day.
Who knows how much longer
it could have lasted, suffering as it was,
before it finally gave up the ghost
and became one of the little scraps of poems
that lurk on the edge of the mind,
mere shades of what they could have been.

We have been very happy together,
my little poem and I,
and though people tend to assume
that it was I who found it that day in the closet
I am not at all sure that that’s the way it happened.
The poem, for its part,
simply refuses to say.

i know what i should say, i know exactly the proper words to use. i know the tone i should take, that i should be forgiving and not accusatory. but another voice whispers inside my head whispers, telling me other things i could say, the hurtful things, to drive someone away

looks like i did it

Last night we watched Muppets Treasure Island because I had a sudden desperate need for backup plans for the evening after Der Fuhrer ruined things once again. And with my nails freshly painted, too. Rae came back from the Unitarian convention full of interesting tales. She bridged in front of three thousand people, apparently...bridging being the crossover between youth and adult memeber of the UU. I had a random memory of reading the Doctor DeSoto books as a child after seeing a character somewhere named DeSoto. No one else remembers it but he was a little mouse dentist. he was cute. and then there was strega nona, which i remember my mom not letting me read for a reason that was never explained. i read them anyway, of course, being naturally independent in my literary pursuits. i asked my mom tonight if she could remember why she didnt want me reading them. she didn't. she barely remembered the books at all.

heather returned from NYU orientation being of the same opinion that I initially had at fairfield. she didnt feel that there were any people remotely resembling the coolness factor of the friends she has now. i didn't see anyone that immediately stood out as someone like a heather or a meghan, and i guess i was kind of hoping that i would find people like that right off, but as sara pointed out, these things never happen overnight. i mean, i didn't know meghan at all, and probably would have continued to see her as just another face in the crowd in not for those first period times together. so you definitly don't always spot the best people right away, and that shouldn't be a deterrent. heather was also worried about the people she saw not being sparkly and not as sexually frank as she expected, but maybe everyone just worries abou first impressions and not being immediately labled or something. me, my goal is to make friends of both genders without being labeled as either lesbian or a man hater. ah, what a switch it would be!

drove by northwest today and already missed it. i got a note from mrs juda thanking me for the chocolates. she said they were great. ah, if she only knew i'd found them languishing in my room, would she have been so enthusiastic?

the things i never say are driving me insane. why am i always the libra, the peacemaker, the one who doesn't start the fights? why are my family the only ones i ever confront and fight with when im pissed? why do i always just go off and cry or sulk or try to ignore it by having fun with others and then never say a thing? it just makes things worse, it just puts negative things into my head. it makes me want to say mean things and do malicious things, to take vengeance for petty slights. it makes me unhappy.