Survival of the Fittest


It is very cold today
cold enough that I am wearing
a coat, two sweaters
and knee-high stockings
under my jeans
yet it is not so cold
as that night in providence
when we waited for the bus
huddled near what we hoped
was the lee side
of a wooden message board
(announcing events, parties,
twenty chances for easy money)

Seven minutes we waited
by your watch
bundled as in the best
middle-class money could buy
still we could not feel the flesh
on our legs or arms
our noses seemed strange
foreign objects when we
prodded them with gloved fingers.
our thick scarves could not stop
the wind’s chill fingers
from seeking our throats
and all that sustained us
was the knowledge that the bus
would soon appear, and welcome
into her warm shelter all those
who could spare one dollar
and twenty-five cents.

I had to wonder then
what it must be
to be truly ‘out in the cold’
for this weather not to be
merely the unpleasant interlude
between home and shopping
but reality itself…
If it only took seven minutes
of a bitter January night
to break us all
to make us willing to trade
our wallets, purchases
and bodies just to be warm again
then I do not know
what a lifetime of this would do.

I wondered what thought
such a person could focus on
to help him ignore the fact
that he cannot feel
his extremities
that every movement is an agony
that brings the razor-edged wind
against his unguarded body
that he will sleep covered
in trash and newspapers
behind a restaurant tonight
and who knows if he will
wake up tomorrow
and who will care?

Perhaps it is the thought of spring
when the worst dangers
are over-curious strays
and cars spraying the sidewalk
with dirty water
when it costs nothing
to sit in the park
and inhale the fragrances of life
for hours and hours and hours
when it is the greatest freedom
to bathe in a rainfall
and stare at the people
hurrying to protect
their beautiful clothing
to be able to think
that at just this time of year
it is almost not a bad thing
to have no home.

ah, the complexity of college life, specifically my own. does it ever end? does it ever reach the point where everyone just stops and says collectively, No more--no more intrigues, no more petty strife, no more secret rivalries and closely held grudges? Of course not, because it's just not in our nature. Man cannot live for any length of time in true harmony.

heather wrote an incredibly revealing entry in her xanga today (props to you, flanny). i was just amazed. i don't particularly love taking stock of all my personality flaws, of which there are many. a lot of the time i just catch myself stereotyping someone based on their clothes, or gossiping, or being generally malicious and think "whoa, this is bad, stop now." and i usually do, but then i do it again, and again, and again and it's like i can't help it or i just don't bother to help it. especially going here, i tend to stereotype all the little abercrombie-wearing brunettes with highlights and the dumbass drunk guys (see?). a lot of the time they just seem to be one giant herd, indistinguishable, and i like being distinguishable, i like that popham can see me halfway across campus walking to macauliffe because of my scarf and backpack. i hated it that julie said she was scared of me during orientation bc of how i dressed but that i'm much more normal now.

god now heather has me going down the im a horrible person path. i'm not and neither is she and i damn well know it. yes i fuck up but everyone does. im not thinking about this anymore tonight.

see, and this is always how i pussy out of it.

announcement: i LOVE the hedwig soundtrack, especially "wig in the box" and "origin of love"--if you can, download them. it's even better to have seen the movie because then you can picture this totally glam-rock transsexual belting out the lyrics, and the very masculine back-up singer who provides the soprano notes lol.

my grandfather is in the hospital with pneumonia. last night my mom said he was doing fine; this morning she said he'd taken a bit of a turn for the worse. i don't have his phone number there yet. already i feel awful because i don't call him as much as i should. i'm not even thinking about the direst of possibilities--more like i keep starting to think about what would happen if--and then i make myself stop because to do that is pointless and will cause me only worry. i hope he'll get better. if not, the only thing i will allow myself to think about the idea of his death is that he will be glad to see his wife and son again. he never really recovered from losing my dad.

in other news, possible snow day tomorrow. i can laze about and work on valentine's day projects. my mom told me she's prepared to sleep over at work tonight; she even took the dog with her so sheena won't flip out and think she's been abandoned like always.

so i've come to the realization i can blame the fact that i haven't just given up and admitted charles is my boyfriend (which he is now basically in all but name) on dear old andrew fusco. i didn't want to admit it to myself, mostly because it vexes me to have been affected, even negatively, by the one i have come to think of as 'annoying pussy-boy fusco', but the truth is that the whole andrew experience has reeeeeally put me off the whole term "boyfriend" and all it signifies. i'm terrified of doing it too soon, like last time, and winding up regretting it with a messy breakup and people crying and me just wanting to get the hell away. it resounds in my memory as the first huge mistake of my college career, which is no doubt to be followed by many more, but can i help if i want to be REALLY sure this is something that i can sustain over a long period of time, as opposed to going through an entire relationship in ONE MONTH? of course the situation is different this time: charles is one of the sweetest guys in the world, a fact that melissa has been attesting to since day one, and i took her word for it because they've known each other since elementary school. also he has none of andrew's more negative personality traits, which i will not go into here because honestly i try to not think about him any more than necessary lol. it's like aaron meadows, aka he-who-shall-not-be-named *shudder* so my logic tells me that i should not be expecthing this situation to mirror the previous one; as heraclitus put it, you never put your feet in the same river twice. but i still have trouble quelling the little voice inside that warns me to stay free, just in case, at least until i'm sure this isn't a house of cards that will just tumble down at the first breeze.

Untitled, Madrid

The night was warm,
The large windows
Of the hotel room
Open like welcoming arms
To the sultry air of the city.
The scent of Madrid at night
Is intoxicating.
It slides through your skin,
Into your veins,
And fills you with desire
For things you cannot even name.

You, tall and foreign,
Were the personification
Of all things illicit,
All that I had never dared dream.
The flame of desire in your eyes
turned to ashes the barrier
of language that rose between us.

What passed between us that night
Was like nothing I had known before.
You kindled in me an understanding
Of things I had heard of in whispers
And blushing admissions;
Our bodies spoke to each other clearly
Though our ears knew nothing.


I have never returned to Madrid,
Yet I have not forgotten the taste of you.
I have not forgotten
the electricity of your eyes,
nor the smell of the heat, the air
that was our only clothing.
Many a night has there been
When I have thrown open
The windows and searched the air
For the faintest trace
Of the exotic scent I crave,
Nights when I slept only fitfully,
Dreaming of you,
Close enough to touch.

three guesses who this is about? lol

i'm such an evil, malicious person sometimes. not always; i try to be a good person for purposes of not being eternally damned and such, even though i don't particularly believe in that. still i have my days when the cruel streak in me takes hold, especially when i discover just how many people around me detest the same person that i do! i can't help it, it made me gleeful to know that i'm not the only one. well, i already knew i wasn't the only one, my wendy feels the same, but still. muahaha.

i really shouldn't let these people bother me, i know. they're inconsequential in the great scheme of things, yet their continued presence, even on the periphery of my existence, is like a small thorn in my side. if i could just make them disappear so i wouldn't have to think of them again (not kill them, just sort of send them away to some desert island they'd never get off of) i really would. when i start thinking down that path and getting annoyed with things that i can't really control, like how i lack the power to dispose of certain people, i just try to think about something happier. i think of my friends here and back home. i think of how much fun i'm going to have surprising people for valentine's day. i think of charles and how happy he makes me. he called me his princess, something i though i'd never let anyone say because my dad used to call me his little princess, once upon a time, but i didn't mind. it wasn't creepy, it was endearing. he's coming back next saturday. i already missed sleeping next to him.

digiov and i had a brief discussion before about men who cry. it's such a cultural stereotype, but i honestly have less respect for guys who cry a lot. it's acceptable if someone has died, if you lost a pet, etc, but otherwise, i can't help it, i think of weepy boys as pussies. it's bad when you start to feel like you're the guy and he's the sniffling chick hanging on your arm. digsusting. i'll be honest, i don't really love it when girls cry over really stupid stuff, but really, we ARE the more sentimental of the two sexes, so it makes more sense for girls to cry! men are so proud of their ability to not show emotion or be really attached to things like girls are; well fine, then suck it up and don't go asking me for kleenex! i cry every so often, but it's almost always about my dad. greg made me cry only a few times, and those were really tears of anger over something that was making me upset and i couldn't seem tell him about. i'd like to be able to say that a guy never made me cry, but when you're that attached to someone, things like that kill. incidentally i haven't talked to greg since our little falling-out over the thoroughly depressing path his life appears to be taking. i don't really mind. i look back at pictures of the two of us smiling and i like remembering those days, because we were very happy together. walking hand in hand, looking at the couple in the window that seemed to follow us wherever we went, we were content with each other. junior year was probably my favorite year of high school. but things change, i accept that, and our relationship now will never be so joyful again. i hope in some sense he still enjoys the memories of the good times, because they were wonderful. i wouldn't give them up for anything.

*popham on the topic of her future honeymoon*: i'm going to go to bermuda.
*us*: why?
*popham*: because i've already been there!
*us*: what? OH--aaaaaah! popham!

last night was amazing.

i went to the mall today with dahts and digiov to do some preliminary v-day shopping for my four valentines. i ended up picking up some things for people's birthdays, plus the hedwig cd which i am very excited about because the songs have literally been in my head for days, especially "wig in the box" and "angry inch". in a game store my friends suggested i buy a dart gun, since both digiov and dahts have one already (meredith darts = dart gun as perfect gift), so i bought the little plastic thing. i get back in here and go to try it out by shooting digiov in the arm. now, we've been playing with the other two dart guns for a few weeks, and while they have some trouble actually functioning, they have never actually caused pain. not so for michelle's, which is a veritable missile launcher. i had digiov yelling in pain even when i shot her from a distance. it's freaky!! so now they say they won't play dart wars with me. we just stood in the hallway taking turns shooting at a target. i'm thinking that a great stress reliever would be to post pictures of people who frustrate me and them pump them full of small plastic darts. well i just shot the picture of me and jessi right in jessi's head, but i love her. no, i'll dig up some evil pictures somewhere....hmmm...

you what's the best time to do your laundry? 8:15 on a friday morning. you know why? absolutely no one is going to be in the laundry room, except of course for those people who got up at 7 and went to calculus only to find out it was canceled and walked back in the freezing cold fuming silently about the fact that people should not be expected to check their emails at 7 in the morning!! yes that was me. i didn''t even go back to bed--i did my laundry, showered, made both beds as a gift to wendy, did some spanish (our first assignment took up five pages in my notebook, and i havent even written the one-ppg comp yet!) and am currently awaiting food with dahts, james and andrew. i'm so hungry.....

"getting done up the ass is kind of like having a pot brownie--it gives you a full-body high afterward" ~ the speaker of this quote shall remain anonymous!

i have so much fun talking to charles online. i find myself looking forward to nighttime just because i know i'll get to talk to him. he's visiting me on friday! wheee! last night, at melissa's urging, i brought up the topic of exactly what we are. he said he wouldnt mind me being his girlfriend, and i explained my reasons for not wanting that and he was ok. he said he would rather we see each other out of wanting to than out of obligation. i also told him that this is basically just a distinction in my mind, since i'm not going to dating/fooling around with anyone else (although looking is most definitely still open, as was demonstrated by my eyeing of tfb in the bookstore yesterday), but, as wendy put it, i just plain don't want to be anyone's girlfriend right now. who knows, that could change.

so i'm a little bored now, though i did a lot of fun things today. i watched a mighty wind, played bomberman and lost spectacularly to james, meredith and tj, played a bit of ff8, read the first chapter in my ridiculously easy history book, and hung out with my ladies. oh, and we played the friends trivia game, but perhaps i shouldnt have listed that under "fun" since i knew the answers to like two or three and meredith and amanda are freakishly knowledgeable about the game, leading digiov to insinuate that perhaps this might have had an adverse effect on their love lives. in the end we were all dying for the game to end, although there were a few funny moments in charades, like when popham was miming joey falling down an elevator shaft and actually tripped on my rug and fell into the door, and when digiov refused to do one because it required her to mime richard and monica making out in a doctor's chair, and she didn't want to use us as props.....we all bounded onto my bed in fear when she said it afterward.

trying to fall asleep last night, i kept going back to the accident in my mind, even though i've been joking about it to people, and feeling that horrible sliding feeling, and feeling this terrible sense that it's all over, i'm going to die, i'll never do anything more than i have till this point....it happend three or four times, and i had to forcibly redirect my mind to something else. it was bad.

i almost died today. driving down with my mom in the tahoe, we skidded on ice and did a 180 in the road, hitting the concrete barrier with the front of the car and then the back, and winding up facing traffic. i have never been so scared in my entire life; strangely, though, my life didn't flash in front of me. it was like one horrible, drawn-out moment. i've never been in a skid-out like that before, and in a perverse way it was almost fun because the car was moving in a graceful way that it never normally would, but then there was just the reality that i could have died. thankfully my mom and i were both fine (she was driving, not me), but the tahoe suffered a little damage to the rear bumper, resulting in my back left door refusing to open. my mom promised she'd have it repaired, though, since she was at fault. i was literally holding on the seat the rest of the way there. i only relaxed my muscles once or twice. i even prayed, and i don't generally pray, but when we skidded a little again (in four wheel drive, going 35 mph, in just slush) i closed my eyes and asked god to just let us get there safely. which we did, and my mom got home fine (taking the highway instead of the merrit parkway which we were on).

in other news, i'm here, i'm all moved in, i'm just waiting for wendy to arrive and then lauren to come back from picking up andrew at the train station so we can go out to dinner. her dad's taking us to joe's american bar and grill, which is super nice of him. it's good to be back, even if dahts isn't coming till tomorrow and no one knows when popham's getting here. all is well. except for poor tahoe, but i still love it.

i can't believe this....it's six fifteen in the fucking morning!! haahaaah!! why am i online and not in bed, you ask, well, it's all charles' fault, cause i only got back to my house at 6am, and then i was hungry since i hadn't eaten anything but brownies for twelve hours so i ate some cheerios and then got like my sixth wind of the evening/morning and decided to come online and blog. reading heather's site i realized that for once i have achieved the golden standard set by one miss heather flanagan and managaed to stay up till the ass-crack of dawn, getting ass no less! whoohooo!!!

yeah so charles actually picked me up here at 730 pm last night, so we spent a little less than twelve hours together. we watched three movies (some like it hot, 28 days later and T3) because for some reason watching movies with charles isn't as weird and non-communicative as it might be, and then we talked, and, uh, yeah eventually we got to the good stuff. i labeled him a housecat, as opposed to my jungle cat, but he can be tutored lol. it was so awesome to be "hanging out" in his brother's room in the basement while his parents slept upstairs and discussing, at five am, what time i should leave; technically i could have stayed till 9am or so, but on the off chance mom or jen awoke in the night and wondered where the fuck i was, i thought it was best if i hied me hence (it didn't help that on my way out jen, seeing that i was taking my electric blanket with me--godsend!--was engaged in all sorts of speculation on what we'd be doing under said blanket. no sense fanning the fire.)

on the way home i felt all rebellious because never before have i gotten home so late/early. actually, i'd never come home at 3am from a date before i went out with charles anyway, but let's not get into the annoying situations presented by certain former boyfriend's nazi parents. i was almost wishing my mom would be up when i got in to demand where i'd been (yeah which is REALLY dumb of me, i know) but of course she wasn't. she left the light on for me, though. it's like motel six up in here.

oh and he gave me a LOTR poster from the movie theather! yay!

time to hit the fucking sack, eh....almost 6:30am. jesus. i'm not fucking getting up till like 3pm or something. but a good night it was!!!!!!!!!!

I had awful dreams last night, undoubtedly the fault of charles for mentioning he used to dream about dinosaurs. in my dream i was in a huge mansion and there were dinosaurs everywhere and we were trying to hide from them, and i was in my own bathroom with this other person, possibly popham, and a velociraptor was trying to get in, and she had an idea and we opened the door and let it in and she grabbed a towel and wrapped it around its head and we forced it into the showerstall and closed the door. yeah in real life that would not save us at all seeing as it's probably way more powerful than us. but in the dream we made it.

in the second part of the dream there was something about vampires, and i was being chased. i'm not sure if this was part of the dino or vamp dream, but at one point i stole off to a different part of the property and buried my diamond ring in a tube, somehow reasoning that even if something killed me i'd come back and get it. there was some thing about me being really really old, like having been reincarnated on the same spot every time, so maybe that's why. at one point i kind of woke up, and then i let myself fall back asleep and i went back to a part where i was about be attacked by the velociraptors, and i was really scared so i told myself to wake up, really forcefully, and made myself open my eyes--and it worked! i was so happy.

i can't impress upon you any further the importance of having an education. i've reminded you over and over that, your "connections" nonwithstanding, you need that little piece of paper to secure you a place in this world. you say you have no ambition--i just wonder how the thought of living like a bum, with no money and no future, doesn' t furnish you just enough ambition to get off your ass and learn something useful. do you want to let your life go to shit? maybe i wouldn't care if i wasn't so angry about the fact that you have squandered opportunities that less fortunate people would have given anything for. the public education you scorn would be like the blessing of god to someone who knows what it's like to struggle to make ends meet. maybe you need to learn what it's like to really suffer in a free-market economy with no skills before you appreciate what your middle-class life has handed you, and what you have spurned.

i made you angry and you stormed offline. i think perhaps you will not talk to me anymore, and i think that perhaps i will not care.

i think perhaps i have deleted you from my buddy list.

gpaultool: we are both mistaken about each other all the time, i think. to be honest, i don't really think we knew each other's insides that well.

ain't that the truth.

What Kind of Drunk Are You?

whoohoo! er....yeah you'd better all watch out if you're around me when i'm shitfaced. which will not be anytime soon at this rate, but still, watch thy back, son.

Sara's post, in which she lamented the fact that she is already losing recently gained knowledge, reminded me of what happened to me today as i sat in a doctor's office in hartford waiting for jen. there was a depressing dearth of reading material-- they actually had the cheerleading magazine. i kid you not. other than that it was either a car magazine or the journal Science, which is generally really densely packed with scientific jargon that i can but faintly comprehend, but i picked it anyway because it mentioned drosophila melanogaster on the cover, and rae knows what a soft spot i have for our beloved fruit flies! anyway, the article was on how somehow made this really complex map of all the protein interactions within a single fruit fly cell (it reminded me startlingly of the quagmire, ladies) because they'd finally decoded the proteome. this got me remembering the genetics conference we went to last year, where we learned that the Human Genome Project is only Phase One; next they have to find the Transcriptome and from there the Human Proteome, or the unique protein for which every single gene has a recipe. then they fix all human disease, yadda yadda yadda. what bothered me was that suddenly i'd forgotten the transcriptome part. what does that mean? it has something to do with RNA, because genes are made of DNA, code for RNA which goes out and makes proteins somehow, but i've forgotten the mechanism, and i can't remember how it works.

anyone reading this is probably going "holy fuck, what's wrong with her, why does she care if she forgot something so complicated if she knows the basic idea?" i don't know why; it feels symptomatic of me forgetting all of ap bio, which i firmly believe to have been one of the most useful courses i ever took, despite my efforts to the contrary by reading books and such. i can honestly say that i feel like i've forgotten so much of what i learned in high school, but somehow it's not true, because i can still do algebra, can't i? i just haven't in a while. i still remember geometry, the proofs, SAS and SSS and how's there's no such thing as ASS. i obviously remember the basic spanish (ok not the words for fruit. i NEVER remember them. las frutas, that's it.) religion, anyone who passed through NWC left with more religious knowledge than they realize. just talk for a while with a catholic public schooler who never had CCD and you'll see, or ask a random older catholic (like my mom) what transubstantiation is, and watch their eyes glaze over. science, umm, er....well i remember a few things from chem and physics, but let's skip that....history, i find myself remembering random shit all the time. art history brought back so much of mr kelly, and at sofia's when i rang up a check for 18.50 i was always tempted to ask if they knew about the compromise of 1850 (yes, extremely dorky i know).

so i don't think i've really forgotten, i think things have just been shuffled slightly in my mind, and in sara's too, so that what we learned is sifted more towards the bottom. we just need to clear the paths a bit, like raking leaves, and we'll remember. i've read a lot about how the mind is more powerful than we give it credit for. hopefully it's true.

oh, and my loony is Ludwig II!!! SCORE! i love this guy, only because he built the fairy tale castles that are always some of the best pictures in those castle calendars. (o-ho, and where did i learn of this fellow? in some random book about the composer richard wagner; apparently ludwig was a big fan for a while and wagner perfected the art of mooching. my hero!)

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

and now i am at providence college, proud owner of a PC license plate, as sara toils about the room assembling her various possessions. my moving-back in is going to be so much more complicated due to the intense amount of CRAP that i brought back to my house. and we have much less space to put it in. but oh well, that's why there's monday!

oh, and the horrible ordeal of getting to providence....yeah we were supposed to hit route 2 right after hartford, but we missed it and voyaged on, to the end of 84 until we hit fucking massachusetts and said "hmm....sturbridge....doesn't seem right!" so we went out of our way for an hour. nothing good comes from massachusetts. nothing. especially nothing with then initials LD.

sara's on the phone with the new man, pat...oooooooooohhhhh. i made him talk last night to provide me with a voice sample but i've already forgotten his voice. when i try to think of what he looks like all i think of is her friend joe, for some reason.

i love how i cant stand being away from computers for long. not even if i'm on a "road trip". being here at a school with people coming back makes me want to go home and be at fairfield. poo.

GO PROVIDENCE!

here i am at sara's, discussing sex, various forms of shaving (yes this refers to you, digiov), the wonders of hydrocortisone cream, school, and plans for spring break (cape cod AND wellesley with the drunken harvard boys! whooot!) i love these girls. they comprise one of the few tendrils tying me to this place, albeit a firm one. sara willl be gone tomorrow, after we drop her off, and heather will leave friday. i won't see rae again, probably, since i'm leaving sunday. being with them tonight gives me a brief pang that we have to be separated, yet again, and that never again will our happiness be complete just with each other. we have other friends, other lives, other committments. our world is no longer this small. so many times i've given thanks for having moved on and found the wide wonderful world of college, but this is one of those nights when i'm prone to remembering the sweetness of just being a high school kid, surrounded by friends with whom one can discuss absolutely anything, even the choice of shaving/waxing/tweezing various bodily parts. yeah!

DiGiMonkey29: it started out as a trim!
DiGiMonkey29: and went too far!
sleepygurl12: oh god
lazarus kitty: hahahahaa
lazarus kitty: i think she gets it now

Last night was fun. I saw deer in charles' backyard, and he made his car spin for me, and i felt that little frisson of fear that's so exhilarating! we sat in my driveway hoping my nosy next door neighbor would somehow be awake to be scandalized, talking, and me for once exercising my limited patience waiting for him to not be so shy... (success! patience works!) we're going out again friday night. he told me he wants to visit me at school, which i would like, and he said he would drive for hours, he didn't care, if it meant he could see me. *smiles*

melissa i miss you! come home so i can say goodbye and leave lol!!

At this point I would like to take a moment to thank god that i have both direction and lack of direction in my life. Direction because I know that in my immediate future I will do my work, go to class, and learn things I want to learn, and lack of direction because as yet I haven't decided what I want to do with my life. I like the confidence of knowing what the coming months will bring, coupled with the freedom of not knowing what the years have in store. Glorious adventures lie ahead, of that I'm sure!

I would also like to thank god for being me. thank you thank you thank you. i spend too much time criticizing myself and wondering how i wound up this way, and sometimes it takes another person's bad example to remind me that being me isn't so bad, after all.

ONE WEEK TILL I GO HOME!!! and by home i mean home to campion 425 and the smiling face of my wonderful roommate, to our twinkling ceiling, to our comfortable beds and all the stuffed animals that never stay put, to having friends in the same hallway, to having full meals whenever i want them, to learning and books and edumacation!! hooray!

tonight i worked with a fifteen year old girl from albania, susanna. she was very friendly, and i honestly put her age at eighteen or so, but she said that was a common assumption, since she grew up pretty fast. she gives all the money she makes to her parents. i've never met another girl her age who would do such a thing and not think twice about it. and so pretty, too--i would have killed to be like her as a freshman in high school. she had no idea that college was not like high school, with no classes a lot of the time. somehow i found that really strange, but i can't remmeber if i understood college when i was a freshman, either.

cold cold cold cold cold. barnes and noble was closed by the time i tried to go tonight, after dropping off rae at aj's. poo. driving home, i passed the open field that always has the most spectular sunsets, and i had the intense desire to get out and lay down and look at the moon and stars. i even pulled the car over into the field, which was basically frozen mud, but the chill that entered when i opened the door was enough to disabuse me of my romantic aspirations. with little else open at nine thirty that i would be interested in doing, i came home, and now i think i will continue to read peter pan, because it's a good book even if it is for kids.

i had a lot of fun tonight... i'd forgotten what dating was supposed to be like, getting to know the ins and outs of someone else's life. i'd forgotten what it felt like to be picked up and dropped off, and i'd forgotten what it felt like to have so much fun, with someone so basically unknown, in the time between. after watching some movies we sat on the couch in the darkened living room and talked, for four and a half hours. who knows how long we might have gone if i hadn't asked the time and realized it was already 3am.

the movie "orgazmo" is just hysterical. it's about a cute mormon guy who becomes a porn star hero named orgazmo by a ccident, because he needs extra money so he and his girlfriend can get married in the big mormon temple in salt lake city (they use a "cock double" for the sex) and there's all these other interesting characters, including one RON JEREMY!! who is now really fat but still in porn. anyway it's a highly amusing movie.

when we got back to my house tonight, i was planning to go in through the garage since i had no keys, but the code WOULDN'T WORK. i was so mad. no one picked up the phone, so i had to bang the doorbell repeatedly till my quite annoyed mother stumbled to the door, but then i had to say goobye to charles, so she snapped "oh FINE" and slammed the door on me lol. charles is such a gentleman; i had to point out that we've already made out several times, there's no need to stand on ceremony. still, a most delightful evening.

i met heather's boo tonight, steven. i was only around for about an hour, since the tahoe needed a checkup and had to be dropped off, but he seems cool, and he laughed at things we were all saying which is always a good idea if you're meeting your friend's friends. we were watching the last unicorn, which for a kids movie is a little messed up, i must say. there's a disgusting harpy with three boobs and a male voice, and this over-amorous tree with huge pink boobs, in which it tries to smother the little wizard (it reminded me kind of queen latifah in chicago).

i started reading river out of eden at work, and promptly forgot it there. it was good, richard dawkins writes well enough to interest the reader, and that's a must-have for a science book. most of the actual science i already was familiar with, so i usually skip the lengthy layman's introduction to the genetic code and its universality, but he couched his explanation in really intriguing terms and used quirkyexamples to illustrate it, so i read it anyway. another book i started, darwin's ghost, is not going so well. the first chapter is spent giving homage to darwin, and explaining how his book is god; personally i couldn't read it, it was too dry. i guess that's why i read books about darwin and his concepts, because they're so fascinating but i can't read the man's work!

in other news, i'm going on a date tomorrow night! my mom acted quite shocked when i mentioned it, enough so that i was slightly affronted. her response: "well, you haven't had a date since you've been home." yeah, like her record's been any better. and look at jen! with these genes it's lucky i get dates at all!

obooks, books, marvelous books! they didn't have selfish gene or the blind watchmaker, like i wanted. i got river out of eden instead, also by richard dawkins. i meant to pick up peter pan and see if they had anything by mark doty, but i forgot.

i bought strawberries at the store!!! so delicious, so cold, so sweet. it's snowing now, but strawberries make it alright.

sara has a new boyfriend, the one she's planning to marry. his name is pat, probably short for patrick. i should ask if he's irish. hmm i looked up the meaning of pat, it's "glory of the father". however, if his full name is patrick it means "nobleman", which is much better.

tonight i'm going to heathers to watch more queer as folk with her and sara and her gay best friend steven, who is visiting from north carolina, i believe? i wonder if he's as fabulous as she's made him out to be.... *wink*

Fog
The crested iris by the front gate waves
its blue flags three days, exactly,

then they vanish. The peony buds'
tight wrappings are edged crimson;

when they open, a little blood-color
will ruffle at the heart of the flounced,

unbelievable white. Three weeks after the test,
the vial filled from the crook

of my elbow, I'm seeing blood everywhere:
a casual nick from the garden shears,

a shaving cut and I feel the physical rush
of the welling up, the wine-fountain

dark as Siberian iris. The thin green porcelain
teacup, our homemade Ouija's planchette,

rocks and wobbles every night, spins
and spells. It seems a cloud of spirits

numerous as lilac panicles vie for occupancy --
children grabbing for the telephone,

happy to talk to someone who isn't dead yet?
Everyone wants to speak at once, or at least

these random words appear, incongruous
and exactly spelled: energy, immunity, kiss.

Then: M. has immunity. W. has.
And that was all. One character, Frank,

distinguishes himself: a boy who lived
in our house in the thirties, loved dogs

and gangster movies, longs for a body,
says he can watch us through the television,

asks us to stand before the screen
and kiss. God in garden, he says.

Sitting out on the back porch at twilight,
I'm almost convinced. In this geometry

of paths and raised beds, the green shadows
of delphinium, there's an unseen rustling:

some secret amplitude
seems to open in this orderly space.

Maybe because it contains so much dying,
all these tulip petals thinning

at the base until any wind takes them.
I doubt anyone else would see that, looking in,

and then I realize my garden has no outside, only is
subjectively. As blood is utterly without

an outside, can't be seen except out of context,
the wrong color in alien air, no longer itself.

Though it submits to test, two,
to be exact, each done three times,

though not for me, since at their first entry
into my disembodied blood

there was nothing at home there.
For you they entered the blood garden over

and over, like knocking at a door
because you know someone's home. Three times

the Elisa Test, three the Western Blot,
and then the incoherent message. We're

the public health care worker's
nine o'clock appointment,

she is a phantom hand who forms
the letters of your name, and the word

that begins with P. I'd lie out
and wait for the god if it weren't

so cold, the blue moon huge
and disruptive above the flowering crab's

foaming collapse. The spirits say Fog
when they can't speak clearly

and the letters collide; sometimes
for them there's nothing outside the mist

of their dying. Planchette,
peony, I would think of anything

not to say the word. Maybe the blood
in the flower is a god's. Kiss me,

in front of the screen, please,
the dead are watching.

They haven't had enough yet.
Every new bloom is falling apart.

I would say anything else
in the world, any other word.


~Mark Doty

Sara made me think about some of the things that music makes me remember:

Metallica,The Black Album: I bought this cd a day before I left for europe, and i played it almost incessantly while i was over there, because i basically wanted to ignore everyone else and focus on what i was seeing. my clearest memory is that of being on the metro in paris, with my headphones on, naturally, on the day that brianna got harassed by that weirdo and mrs rousseau cussed him out in french.

Gladiator Soundtrack: only one song on this cd really applies, I have no idea what its name is, but it's from the battle scene in the beginning, so it's really powerful. I had it on when we stopped at the ten millionth lookout point over the grand canyon (hopi point, maybe), and mr tressler somehow considered it disrespectful for me to have my headphones on (like a giant hole would care). ah, the canyon....so magnificent, it seemed almost too much to take in, like a giant mural stretched on an invisible frame....and then the cold, the wind, the snow, and the endless repetition of lookout after lookout...not the bestest memory.

Daredevil Soundtrack: I bought this right before i left on the southwest trip, referred to above. the feelings attached to this cd aren't as strong as the ones to metallica, but hearing it sometimes vaguely reminds me of the long hours on the bus, watching the red-brown scenery pass ever so slowly before my eyes. it reminds me of steve and luke and wondering what kind of music they were listening to. it reminds me of being on the bus at night and feeling as though everyone was alseep but me. it also reminds me of driving to that random lookout point because we had time left over before the easter vigil in that mission church, where i sat down on a post which just so happened to be filled with water. wet underwear for hours, whoohoo!

No Doubt, Tragic Kingdom: one of the first cds i ever owned, i got it for my birthday freshman year, along with a sailor moon puzzle from sara. i listened to the cd endlessly while i put the puzzle together in my dining room (except for that one piece of lita's hair that i was convinced the cat had eaten). whenever i listened to it after that i couldn't get that time out of my head. maybe it bothered me because it was just six months before my dad died, before everything changed, and i was someone different then. i gave the cd to juan sophomore year.

Dashboard Confessional, Hands Down: this song was very popular right at the beginning of this year, i remember it being on tv a lot. i especially remember watching on the tv in andrew's room, when he was still with julio. yes, sadly, this song reminds me of andrew!

Tool, Anima: this reminds of the Tool concert. how orgasmic that night was, being not thirty feet from the stage and those huge speakers, probably sacrificing some of my hearing but not caring because it was just so damn worth it.

oh god, i'm dying....my temp was 103.6 an hour ago....chills, fever, sore throat, DAMN YOU FLU! i've been in this bed since 2am and i've left it twice...or was it three times? i don't know, i couldn't really stand up for long. i haven't actually been asleep since 2pm, i've just sort of been lying here, thinking half-coherent thoughts.

i went out to see bad santa last night with mel, jessi and charles. awful movie in my opinion, but it was so funny hearing melissa's reaction to things. i felt sick before i went and really awful afterward, but i had about a four hour grace period for the movie itself. how nice. after i got home i talked to charles online for a chem class sophomore year, anyone? when he mentionewhile...he sent me this site, Something Awful which is quite amusing. he goes to uconn, he's a chem major....baaad memories of zubrowski's d he writes poetry, a little warning bell went off in my head *greg greg greg* until it was determined that he prefers cheesy romantic poetry to depressing my-life-is-shit poetry. fine by me. oh yeah, and he's 20....he called me a youngun! i was quite indignant. before anyone starts asking questions, i have no idea where this might go. we're going back to school in a few weeks anyway, plus there's that whole me swearing off boyfriends thing.....yeah.

i feel like shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

this i wrote the other day, after some pondering the way certain things went in certain relationships. why am i being vague, please, it's about greg, anyone with a brain could figure that out. he told me himself he doesn't read this anymore. what a coincidence, i try to keep mysel from reading his too.

I used to wish, a long time ago, that you would write about me. I wanted you to put onto paper the words you said to me all too rarely; I wanted something of you that I could hold in my hands. I wanted to be able to run my hands over the indentations formed by your pen, to feel you there. I wanted to read your words over and over, until they resounded in my mind like the chords of a favorite tune.
I know what you will say when you read this. You will say that you didn’t know, that I should have told you. You will think communication has always been my greatest problem (the irony of it, that a lover of language could never express herself to you). Oh, but I tried to tell you, many times, and you never seemed to understand. I told you once that what I wanted more than any gift was a letter from you, wasn’t that a clue?
There was a time when I read your work constantly, wondering if you would ever mention me. You told me that you didn’t write about love; you only drew on your darker emotions. You said that I made you happy, but you could never reflect that in your writing. Even knowing the emotions you tapped into were only memories, it pained me to know that it was you seeing these dark images of life.
It was only after our time together ended that I got what I had desired. You did write about me, but not as I had so often wished; there was only bitterness and anger in your words. The irony was overwhelming—only after I hurt you and left you did you find it in yourself to write about me. Did loving me never spark you to put pen to paper? Sometimes when I thought about you, the feelings of love would just well up inside me, filling me so completely that I just had to write, had to get some of it out, or I thought I would explode. What I wrote was by turns inspired, sweet, and utterly nonsensical, but there it was, on paper, proof that emotion could transform even me into a grinning idiot. I wanted so badly for you to feel the same way.
If you are wondering now if this was important to me, yes, it really was, more than I ever could have told you, and more than you probably could have understood. At the end of it all, there is nothing left to say but yet another goodbye.

I'm sick.....this is god's vengeance upon me for certain immoral activities in which i have been wont to partake. i have been smited, smote, smitten smoted, whichever is the past tense of "to smite".

of course, if i only believed in a wrathful, smiting god, this would be a lot scarier to me. luckily, i believe in what i have come to call privately a "happy-bunny" god. this god just wants love and peace and happy bunnies to abound on the earth. ignore the fact that a surplus of bunnies messes up the food chain; evolution and some hungry carnivores will tackle that issue. i think god would rather people find happiness than some sort of sanctified, isolated spiritual heaven on earth. hence why this god would not mind homosexuals, if they're in love, or mixed race marriages, or sex before marriage, etc (i do believe my happy bunny god would object to any liasions with the happy bunnies themselves, since there can't really be love there, and that would make the bunnies most distinctly unhappy). my god would rather people be among friends, experiencing joy and laughter and how amazing it is to be included in a group of people who know you and love you, despite of all your faults and missteps, than to be on their knees in a drafty church, reciting from memory something of which they have only a vague understanding. my god would rather a single, heartfelt thanks for the love one person has recieved from another than all the prayers ever uttered.

oh yes, and my god doesn't smite people just for consuming alcohol and making out with people (almost all of whom are friends anyway). perhaps some smiting would be deserved for reeeeeallly bad things, but the happy-bunny god really isn't into that. and that's just the way i like...*drifts into song* that's the way, uhuh uhuh, i like it!

new year's eve.....where to begin? we had a room at the residence inn in windsor, five minutes away from my house. according the official story, we were at stoner's house, but in fact she was with mike, though she did stop by (no one could kiss her, she has a new mono; heather was sad). the room was HUGE! it had a full kitchen, fridge, oven, dishwasher and microwave, and two beds. there were twelve or so present: me, sara, heather, mel, jessi, khara, deconti, charles (friend of mel's), matt (friend of brian's), pace, and emily. greg was supposed to come but never showed; we assumed he went somewhere where he could smoke weed. his loss, because it was an orgiastic good time!

sara and i agreed beforehand not to get drunk, because we're not really into that and besides our first times should be with each other not random men. we were sharing drinks, though apparently she sips and i swig, so i ended up with 2 bottles to her 0.5. i was only buzzed for maybe half an hour, and she never was, but still it was fun to do whatever and yet be in control so you could properly appreciate the antics of others!

in terms of sexual activity, let's be honest. aside from the impermeable triangle of me X sara X heather (which we would NOT break evne tho a drunk heather begged, to help her reach her goal) and non-girl-kissing emily, everyone made out with everyone else last night! there was some further activity among certain couples but that's not getting detailed here. two more people said im a really good kisser, charles and khara! and greg apparently said it too the other night at khara's, but you know what, it would have nice if he'd bothered to say that while we were frickin going out and not now! yeah so i dont even know how many people i'm up to now. let's count:

aaron
manuel
greg
annie
pace
melissa
jessi
khara
jess
charles
matt
andrew
deconti

five girls, eight guys! whoot still the right balance there! hmm feels like i'm missing a guy but i don't know who....deconti left our bottle of champagne in the freezer and forgot and it exploded. at midnight i kissed melissa, my backup backup since jessi won pace in a coin toss and charles was sick, but it was good because i really actually love the person i kissed at midngiht! then i went around and quickly kissed everyone else present lol. anyway i spent most of this morning awake, since no one fucking slept after khara made us go to to bed at like one, except charles and mel who passed out. i talked to em for a while, which was good because rarely do i get to talk to her one on one. then i talked to sara for a bit. heather and pace started making out on the floor, and to cover the noise people started singing, there was a chorus of that 'if you want to destroy my sweater" song, and khara sang jabberwocky! when charles was throwing up emily sang a moulin rouge song to him :-) in the wee hours charles recovered and we spent the rest of the time spooning. em and heather evacuated the bed bc they thought shit was going down, but it seriously wasn't, unlike other parts of the room. he held my hand in bed, it was sweet.

the humorous recollections of this kind of event i always leave to heather cause she captures the moment. this was the rated PG 13 version of events, mind you--other people might not be so kind!