I have no idea when I will have the chance to actually post this, but here goes. It’s 11:48 pm, I’m having some alone time in my room and it’s finally time that I chronicle some of the amazing, different, slightly scary things that have been happening since my mom and greg left Sunday at four thirty. Ok, first of all, I’m loving this, despite some brief feelings of weird homesickness, and “wow, this is like living in a hotel! When do I go home?”, and worrying about my mom and how lonely she’ll be without me. I left her a card telling her how much she’s done for me and that I love her. Typical of our relationship, though, she didn’t mention it when I talked to her on the phone.
I must say this: the absolute best decision I made was choosing the substance-free floor. THE BEST. EVVEEEEEER. This is like the coolest experience of my life. We signed a contract last night agreeing that not only will we not have illegal substances in the dorm (Campion), we will not come back to the dorm inebriated. Ie, if you get trashed, sleep elsewhere. Unfortunately some people seem to have arrived here against their wishes, which is odd considering the dean of student life said there was a huge waiting list to get sub-free. The two top floors of Campion Hall are sub-free. I don’t know how many people that actually amounts to, but it’s all soph and freshmen. Fourth floor, where I am with Wendy, 425 in the corner, is entirely freshman. Both floors are divided on the half into guy-girl. Wendy and I were determined to have THE coolest room, but we’ve been unfortunately upstaged by Katie and Lauren down the hall. Don’t know how they did it, but they have the coolest room ever. One of the ideas we’re pitching to our RA is having floor competitions, like for best room, neatest room, dirtiest, etc, and WE want that award. We’re working on it. Our beds are bunked against the window, our armoirs are by the front door, and our desks and bureaus do an L along the walls. Someone told me our room, being a corner, is wider than the others. We have a lot of floor space in the middle, which is nice! We’ve made it really comfy and colorful….the walls are covered, but they looked planned out and elegant, not hodgepodge. I used to my ties to decorate the bedposts. Greg’s pirate flag is hanging from the ceiling. I propped sara’s gift to me up on the microwave. Along with the michell prom doll, the significance of which I am tired of having to explain to everyone after they remark on me having a Barbie. I put greg’s tshirt, which he kindly donated to me slept-in, on huggy the bear. It makes a nice pillow. Wendy liked the top bunk, which is good because in our old bunk beds, I was on top but I had a ladder and a railing. Nothing here, and me afraid of heights! Eep!
Ok none of this explains why this is so cool, and why sub free is in particular so very cool. It’s so weird but at random moments one of us will just shake our head and go “oh my god this rocks!” and give everyone high fives. Ok, so there’s no partying in our dorm, not of the drinking variety, but tonight we had sixteen people in 415 watching meet the parents, reno 911 and family guy, eating popcorn and having fun. Last night there was a party in Regis next door, and no one there slept. Someone got arrested. Two freshies are on probation from ORIENTATION. How is that possible, I don’t know. Yeah so we don’t have to worry about stupid parties at 3am, although if you leave your door unlocked, as sean down the hall found out, crazy people walk in at 2am and don’t leave. Lock thy doors. We don’t have to smell vomit in the bathrooms, which other Ras have promised their students will begin this weekend. We might miss the walk of shame, but I’m sure a few people around here will have to do it. Sub-free halls and BRs are notoriously cleaner than any other. This still isn’t the main thing though—the very best thing is the people. The emphasis on our floors is community, and it’s so amazing. We really are a community, in a way that other dorms aren’t, because other dorms haven’t necessarily committed to the same lifestyle choices as we all have. People here are so friendly and so open, and I know one could say that’s just Fairfield, but no it’s not. There are plenty of snobby people, plenty of drunks. I’ve met them in my orientation group, where they discussed drinking habits and the cost of a taxi ride to the beach houses. So far three people have noted the same phenomenom I have: with a few exceptions, the coolest and nicest people I’ve met independently of the floor turn out to be living on Campion 3 or 4. it’s the strangest thing, but so comforting, especially when we all get together and people are so different but united in this aspect. We have one girl, Mo, who’s a recovering alcoholic. Everyone else has a lot of varied reasons for choosing this floor. I didn’t actually give it a lot of thought, beyond the fact that despite my having tried many types of alcohol, I do not like them, and I do not wish to imbibe them, nor do I wish to be forced to cohabitate with those who do so on a regular basis. Already last night a drunken lacrosse player was arrested after he injured a girl he was carrying. Last year eighteen ambulances were called in the first MONTH of school. Much drinking occurs here, but I’m comfortably insulated from that, and if I want to go to a party to party, I can. Freshmen are not supposed to go to the beach without a specific invitation, and Wendy scored us one from one of the improv guys, so we’ve got that option. Also, so far I’ve noticed that a majority of the people on the sub-free are on some sort of merit scholarship from the school. I know that five of the thirteen university fellow scholars, myself and roomie included, are here (I get my laptop tomorrow, complete with the Ethernet card, so michelle can be wireless and online! Whoot!) Chris is here! The pic of myself I put on our door under my name is the one heather gave me from the southwest, of me in that blue hoodie of hers, with chris right there in the background. He’s downstairs. Wendy and I have had so much fun just walking around introducing ourselves to everyone, knocking on doors, although most are left open (more common with girls than guys) and writing on those little boards “Visit 425! Love, Michelle and Wendy”. We’re in a corner and don’t want to be forgotten. Tonight when we were getting ready to go to the carnival, we were going to go with Lauren and Katie from down the hall, and we wound up with 22 girls and three guys, a huge herd moving as one across the campus. At one point we were a huge long line and I made a pirates of the Caribbean analogy! I made an engraved candleholder tonight with a pirate ship on it, and another with ship rock/ monument valley on it, in honor of the old southwest. I got a henna tattoo of a gorgeously plumed peacock, and two temporary tattoos, a snarling tiger on my back and barbed wire on the back of my neck. It was so frickin loud. I skipped the following dance to come back here and do the movie thing, and now wendy’s sketching and I’m writing and we’re discussing the glories of sub-free yet again! I’m making guy friends. The guys on these floors are so friendly. Actually the only standoffish ones are the ones who didn’t want to be here and are understandably upset about being contracted to be sober.
Ok more stuff about sub-free, and just so you know, this post has taken a while to be writing, in between doing other things. First of all, all the RA s here get a certain budget to plan activities and field trips and such; our four RA s get double that, simply because we’re sub-free. So we can have a lot more stuff to do and places to go. And, one of the very coolest things of all, something Harry Potter related because of course that is so cool. Yesterday the RA s made us fill out this weird survey with moral questions and personality questions like “mark year: first year, second year, third year. are you: cunning, hardworking, adventurous or organized? If you were a superhero, what would be your power?” Even the bathrooms were marked “: WOMEN’S Freshmen (1st Years). a friend of mine went and was chatting with our RA, Karen, who told her that this year they’ve decided to sort the sub free floors into Hogwarts Houses and do inter-house competitions like in HP!!! How frickin’ cool! Now more than ever I need my Ravenclaw scarf back. If I’m in Ravenclaw, that is; they didn’t mention this before so that they wouldn’t skew the survey for everyone trying to be Gryfffindors. Wendy likes HP, which is excellent. Some people have never read it here. The third floor rooms even had HP postcards attached to the doors!! One of the guys down there said I could have his when he takes his name down. Oh and I met my first person to have had a religious opposition from to HP. Her name’s Katie, I’ve mentioned her twice I think, and she’s really cool. I met her back at orientation and I never realized she was, to put it frankly, a jesus freak. Christian rock music (loves switchfoot, sara), youth ministry, religious rallies, prays over her food, told Wendy she wouldn’t walk next to her if she wore this trampy top to dinner, etc. Yet she’s not some reticent, pale little thing. She’s lively, outgoing, even boisterous. She never read the books, yet believed they advocated witchcraft. Until the pope officially accepted them, that is. Oi. Wendy and I refrained from arguing with her, but we privately agreed that that’s crap, and who would suddenly change their opinions of something because one old man in Rome suddenly says it’s ok? We’re both unaffiliated religiously. Lots of people here wearing crosses. Never saw that at northwest outside of campus ministry, really. ok that's all i have time for right now...i have to get dressed for my whole fifty minutes of class today. creative mind! whoot!!

Well, this is it. Tomorrow morning, at the ungodly hour of 7, i leave my house for fairfield. i hope my mom will be ok without me. that's actually my biggest fear right now, that she'll be really lonely. i got a thank you card at cvs today and wrote down all the things that i never actually say to her. i'm going to leave it so that she'll find it when she comes home tomorrow. i wanted to avoid a crying scene, because that would just make me feel more sad about leaving. as for everything else, bon voyage, and it's about damned time. meg and ash have been in classes for a week! lol. and here i am still running my last load of laundry. well after this i'm packing up the computer, calling my roommate, and packing the car. wish me luck.

ok ok i haven't updated in two weeks. i've been very busy, though. super crazy busy. all my friends have now gone off to college, except for me and sara. thus far i've heard from meghan and ashley and they seem to be having a good ol time, although ashley had some schedule troubles. tonight was my last night of torture at sofia's, for which i am heartily thankful. so many people told me they'd miss me, it was really touching, and i mean that in the most hallmark-ian way possible. i will miss so many of the waitresses, even if sofia's itself connotes boredom and annoyance....especially on saturday mornings, racing cheryl and carolyn to finish the crossword...listening to pat swear like a trucker...karen and her change obsession....maria and her "magic" tie....val and her pet squirrel mario. there's so many others, like rennie our sweet busgirl from transylvania, and ashlee, a made-up version of jess stone, and neurotic little joann, and deb with her donuts, and karen green, who always called me sweetpea. the guys i won't really miss, especially not melo calling me pocohantas. and gee, who wouldnt miss charlie trying to smack your ass and tell you over and over about his stupid seating rules? i'll see them all in december, i guess.. i hugged my boss jen when i left. i'll miss her, she was so nice.

sometimes it seems like there is just too much to miss. i worry about my pets when im gone. there won't be anyone to let sheena out between the hours of 3 and 11, nor let the kitties in if there's a storm or something. sapphire won't have anyone to sleep with, and cinni-mini will be even more depressed. i'm just starting to connect with binky, and here i go running off on him. cleo will still be her freakishly attached self when i return, i'm sure. my mom i hope will be ok. i plan on calling her pretty often, since i'll have a cell phone on wednesday. she's pretty solitary anyway, but even the solitary get lonely. but hey, five pets would keep anyone company, right?

greg and i agreed that it's a good thing we're both independent people, otherwise we'd be miserable right now at the thought of separation. we've done it before, we'll handle it. i'm sure i'll miss having him seven minutes away...i'll miss the way his hair smells, and the way he smells when he's all sweaty, and how damned cute he is, epsecially with that little-boy look on his face. but we'll be ok, and people who say otherwise, well that's their opinion. greg and i won't be forever together, i know that, but i'm not going to be shallow and say gee honey, time to cut my losses because i've got soooo many guys i wanna make out with now!all i have to say to that is: ummmm no. if things should change, so be it, and we'll deal with that when and if it happens. as it stands, i'm going off to school confident in the knowledge that i have someone who really loves me here. and that's such a wonderful thing!

oh and i met wendy!!! she's so cool! we had lunch at the macaroni grille and then we went wandering aroudn the mall for a few hours. she has three cats, one of which is named dusty...she doesn't like jewlery so she wears colored shoelaces as necklaces. and she's cute, and my size, but an inch taller, and reddishy brown blonde hair. i bought a new purse and gave the pink one to flanny. she likes pirates too lol and all things sesame street. i'm looking forward to this so much! sara told me a horror story about her poor friend katie, who on her third night at uconn had already been made a Sexile. that's awful. her roommate literally kicked her out. unfortunately, katie's a quiet person an she probably won't raise hell like she ought to to get a new roomie. i hate the thought of someoen being so blatantly taken advantage of ,t though.

right before heather left she finally gave me, rae and sara our old birthday gifts, which are AMAZING. she took three barbies--a blonde, an "ethnic", and a black haired one, and made Prom Dolls for us! she recreated rae's junior prom dress and sara's and my senior dresses, right down to hairstyles and accessories. my dress is absolutely perfect right down to the placement of flowers on the lace. it's just so cool. it's the best gift i've ever gotten, trumping even greg's wonderful cd. greg's deviantart pic that's not an actual photo, i don't have those online, but greg took one of my doll's pics and messed around with it on deviantart. it's so cool!!!

So much stuff to do before college. I've obtained so much STUFF. i never knew that my mere existence relied on so much STUFF. i have boxes filled with STUFF now. i have even more STUFF i need to acquire before i leave. and i have so little time!!!!

monica just left. i notice my sister's grown wise and has started evicting her before my mom gets home. my mom has a serious dislike for her. dude i miss meghan and heather and melissa and jessi! why must everyone go away so soon before we leave? i'm stocking up on stationery and will soon have stamps. i want to send letters, not just email, and i want to get them, too....

WHEEEEEE!!!!! talkingtomyroommateandshessocoolheeheeandshesmakingallherfriendsjealoustellingthemaboutmeifeelspecial!!!

whew. calm thyself. wendy is so awesome, though...she's an independent like me, she thinks that partisan stuff is annoying like me, she doesnt like to see dems and reps badmouthing each other like me! she doesn't have a chosen religion, either...she likes existential literature (we're discussing it now) and shopping and harry potter like all of us (she went to the party too) and she has lots of stuffed animals like heather and she says whoot like sara and she takes latin like rae and she likes wicca too. and she was worried about having a bad roomie, too:

Luckieducki420: and you're inteligent too! this is great. i was so scared i was going to get a roomate who was a party animal/conformist/doesnt think for herself bimbo.. you're totally the opposite
India Ink15: lol
Luckieducki420: thank you god
India Ink15: haha
India Ink15: my thoughts exactly

woohoo!!! wow. she already met the improv troupe and is scouting one of the guys. i rememeber thinking a coupel of them were hot. hmm...we are curently agreeing that we must use the buddy system if we go to fairfield beach, aka hunting ground for the seniors and the "freshmeat". idon't think they'll be breaking down my door at any rate.

i just lost the longest post i've written in so long. i started it out about meghan and her dog. i talked about my cat pepper and what happened when my dad died...and then i talked about my feelings about that like always. and by about halfway through i was crying so hard i could barely see the screen. and then it was gone. maybe it's for the best. maybe no one else should have read that anyway. i have such trouble communicating my feelings about my dad to anyone who didn't know me then. it's easiest with sara, i guess, because she lost her dad too, and rae because she's gone through so much pain in her family. heather's good too, even though she never met my dad. i just can't explain to people i met later the phenomemon of my father. i can't whittle his existence down to a few coolly summarizing sentences. to undeerstand why i feel the way i do, why i feel the pain and the guilt, the many-leveled guilt, over what i did and didn't do, over how i feel now versus how i felt then, you would have to understand the relationship my dad had with us. so much about him i didnt even understand till after his death, which only increased my grief. whenever i try to explain his behavior he sounds hard, callous, and not the over-stressed man who tried so hard and mistakenly thought himself a failure. i'll never have his brilliance, and i'll never have that sense of humor, or that wit that created so many jokes and skits, or that hand that drew cartoons for us and created billy and bobby, our hand puppets, but i hope i have his strength. when i can't explain my dad to myself, sometimes, how can i expect him to be a real person to those who never knew him? sara's dad is like a sort of phantom to me, almost corporeal sometimes but always retreating swiftly to the realm of the unreal as soon as topics swerve to more mundane items. i know his face, i know some things about his life, i know a few of sara's memories of him. but he never existed in my world, he never touched my life, and so he will always be a little two-dimensional. just like my mother's parents. i know what my children will feel about my dad because it's the same way i look at stephen hennessey. who was he? a postman, a veteran, a lover of animals, my mother's hero, who died when she was only five (of a heart attack. coincidence?) i half-remember his face from a few black and white photos. the man died in 1955. i've seen his grave but i would never weep over it. he meant nothing to me, and he will mean even less to continuing generations. what will my children know of joseph thomas dimarzo? the bald jokes? the dry wit? the ability to understand math and science that most people only grasp at futilely? will they hear about his love for the tahoe? his stories about him and peter and their adventures growing up? about xaverian and the russian and the FCC? about beating up the peeping tom? his first job feeding the dogs at a junkyard? driving hot rods for mr boch? working on nuclear submarines, and the old story about sleeping on a torpedo? getting drunk at the party where he met my mom? about hte feud with my mother's family? about my grandpa? or will they only see a face in my collage, listen to a few old anecdotes, and write him off as another dead relative?

is it really all up to me?

In less than one month I will be living with a girl by the name of Wendy Scola, from Oxford, CT. she's a theater major, she likes bright colors, and she seems both nice and intelligent. so far, so good! if she thought the fact that she's studying theater and i'm studying english/history would be a problem, it's so not. look who my friends were in high school--with the exception of sara, they were all in choir, band and/or theather. i've been exposed to that world--i can survive, even if she's a fan of show tunes or something. but at least i'll know someone else who'll probably be going on the trips to new york to see plays. the first one is in october, we're going to see Rent. she's calling me back tomorrow for the requisite in-depth roomie conversation, about study habits, sleep habits, eating habits, etc. we agreed to either bunk or loft our beds for more room, and that we don't want to buy the bland carpet the school offers. we're going to try to find some funky throw rugs instead. knowing my roommate has made this all so much more real. wow.

so i skipped khara's party tonight in favor of spending the first night of my jen-less weekend quietly at home, cleaning and reading and watching tv. i wasn't exactly in the right mood to laugh and take photos while everyone got shitfaced around me. khara IMed me a while back with the invitation/demand "come to the fuckin party!" apparently she and jessi were already wasted, heather wasn't yet. i hope none of them were driving home. the hoyers are out of town so i guess everyone could crash there. do they know i don't drink? i'm not sure. at jess' house last time i tried some of the parrot bay rum with jessi, but while she found it delicious i was chugging down water to erase the strong, sour, alcohol-y taste. it's a good thing i didn't drink any more, or i'd have had to stay over and watch dawson's creek with all of them. or maybe i could have tolerated it if i were drunk? but it's the getting drunk part that i can't tolerate, isn't that funny? sure, i know people say a drink or two lowers your inhibitions and relaxes you, but if getting to that point of relaxation requires me to drink something that is both nasty-tasting and, yes it's true, TOXIC to the human body, i'll have get my jollies elsewhere. i do long to try a margarita, though. or a daquiri. i would like to experience the more pleasant effects of a moderate amount of alcohol, if it were palatable and only if i were enjoying it in the company of friends, not guys, and not in a place where i'd ever have to get behind the wheel of a car, and not in a quantity where i would fear for the well-being of my liver. i don't want to be falling down drunk because that entails a hangover. . but people always talk of being very relaxed after a glass or two of wine....i'd like to know how that feels. you know, i bet a whole lot of that freshman twenty crap comes from the unnecessary calories in booze. if college kids avoided that, i bet they'd all be a lot slimmer. i'm pretty sure they're not all drinking bud lites and counting carbs while they're falling face down in puddles of their own vomit....

all this said, i hope everyone at khara's is safe tonight, especially flanny. yawn. late. hey it's sunday! greg and sara both come home today. yipee!

My head hurts...it feels like i have a hangover, except that i haven't drunk anything aside from some oj. plus i dont really know what a hangover feels like, although my boss tony thinks i do because i used that as an excuse to get out of work once when i just plain didnt feel like going. he reminded me about it today when i was telling him about how im living on the substance free floor. it's sad but it made for a better exuse than pleading illness, mostly because all the other girls at sofia's carouse frequently. why should i be any exception? *cough* because i'm not a drunken partygoer, that's why, but my boss doesn't need to know that. actually i think i used it to get out of work the day after the prom. i think i blamed it on bad seafood at the dinner but hinted (therrefore making it obvious) that i was hung over. anyway val believed me. i wouldnt ever do it again, though, since the new policy is that you can't call out after noon on the day you'e scheduled to work.

speaking of tony, he let me drive his new mercedes to staples yesterday since i didn't have my car. for once i understood why people buy luxury automobiles...all leather interior, the softest leather ever...the best sound system, a super smooth ride and nice handling. anything handles better than an suv but still, you could sense the niceness. of coursei was terrified that i'd hit something, but i was safe! i also managed to back meghan's mom's van out last night in west hartford center and also not hit anything. AND i backed my mom's van out blind at stop and shop tonight, in between two large trucks, and made it! woohoo! now the next step is for me to get izzy to let me drive his corvette. muahaha. he lets ferrer, one of the guys in the back, drive it sometimes, so why not me, eh? just cause i'm seventeen and been in two accidents shouldn't be any detrrent to someone letting me drive their very expensive midlife crisis-mobile.

oh lordy. reading people's blogs becomes an addiction sometimes. not because it makes you high but more that your utter incredulity keeps drawing you back time after time, reading each nonsensical, fantastical entry with growing fascination/horror at how someone could really think that they have all the answers...when they live and they think like that? or maybe that's just the Answer for them, and if so please stop trying to pass it off as a panacea for mankind's ills, it's not. some people are inexplicable.

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.

Late Night Inspiration

Sometimes I try too hard to write.
The page is fresh and full of possibility.
My hands are warm, poised over the keys.
The cursor blinks out its endless rhythm.
Waiting, always waiting.
It must be ever-patient,
For at times I have spent hours in this position.
It is always the same:
My brow furrows,
My mouth curls into that concentrated scowl
And all my senses focus
On loosing the flow of genius
Which surely lurks just below the surface
Of my temporary mediocrity.

I have heard of poets
Who locked themselves in their studies
With only pen and paper,
And perhaps a glass of water,
For days on end.
Perhaps they thought if they waited long enough
The poetry would surrender
And crawl, emaciated, from its hiding place
To be swiftly chained onto paper.

My poetry, alas, seems to be made of stronger stuff
I suspect it has found some other way
Of supporting itself.
Perhaps in some well-concealed spot inside me
There is a small farm
With tall rows of wheat and corn,
And a few cows and chickens in the dairy.
There is a well and a trickling brook,
And in the evenings the sun dies
In a blaze of glory over the trout pond.
A gentle plume of smoke rises
From the farmhouse where my poetry lives
Content in its solitude
And amused by my clumsy attempts
To draw it out.
Meanwhile, I grind my teeth
And stare at the screen,
Hoping it will give in soon.
Dinner is almost ready,
And I am very hungry.

wrote that tonight...i amuse myself by thinking random little thoughtlings like that.

i smell sexy now, with him all over me. if i close my eyes it's like he's there beside me.

I was looking through my stuff tonight and came across this note between me and ashley from junior year. We used to write notes endlessly in physics because we were so bored....we used to do it in bio freshman year, between us and kat, asking questions back and forth.

Me: Jesus, is it just me or is everything in this class related to sports? Would you rather be trapped with one person in a small room or twenty people in a bigger room?

Ashley: One person in a small room. Ans yup, this class is all about sports. We should talk about rotating cows again. Would you rather listen to Mr. Luddy talk for 24 hours or Mrs Lynch talk for 24 hhours?

Me: Mr. Luddy. He doesn't seem to notice when I'm not paying attention. Lynchie yells at me.

Ashley: True.

Me: Would you rather have a staring contest with Jackie or Pacman?

Ashley: Jackie. I'd lose quickly and i wouldnt have to stare at Pacman's creepy face!
Would you rather be extremely hot or extremely cold for a long time?

Me: Extremely cold. It's easier to put more clothes on than to take them all off...besides i think there's a law about being naked in public. If you had to live with just one person on a desert isle, who would it be?

Ashley: I'd live on an island probably with you because once we got sick of each other we'd have no problem sitting on two different sides of the island by ourselves. Would you rather have to kiss Pacman or Kevlar?

Me: Oh dear god no...I guess Kevlar, because i could then avoid him for the rest of my life. And he's not as scary.

That last bit is really amusing, especially as seeing that "Pacman" turned out to be very cool and not scary...and I didn't end up kissing Kevlar. *cough*

Did anyone else know that Anna Karenina throws herself in front of a train at end end? I didn't, but today alone I have seen no less than three references to that, in the newspaper, in The Hours, which I am currently reading, and in Maxim of all places. I have two copies of that book and I've never made it past page one hundred. Someday.

I'm bringing the Golden Compass to work tonight...also got the Subtle Knife from the library. Creepy retarded guy was there again waving to me!

You know, acting like a fight didn't happen solves nothing. it wasnt even a fight, more like a brief period of discord, but ignoring does littl good to anyone. i don't feel like discussing it over the phone, though. i'll have to wait till i can see him face to face.

harry potter is amazing. i can't really say anything on the off chance that some unexposed person reads this, i don't want to ruin the experience for anyone. i cried at the end, though. of all the people to die, i wanted that character to die the least. i guess it hit me especially because of the kind of relationship they had, and what kind of impact that had on harry...rowling wrote that from so well. but i really liked the bit that luna lovegood says, about how the dead aren't very far away, they're just behind a veil...

I wrote in a journal down at fairfield....maybe i'll copy that in sometime. i also has this big self-realization thing going on late last night. maybe not self realization. i dont know what it was. something had been bothering me, and i thought about it and wrote this whole long poem and then i felt so much better. yeah it was about greg, and our relationship , and how it was going to work out next year, and after i wrote i felt so relaxed and i just wanted to see him. but when i called him at home i only got the half greg, the part that he can spare for conversation while he's really messing around online. all i could hear were the little keys clicking in the background, and there he was giving the monosyllabic answers that he always does when he's doing something else, and i just wanted to throw the fucking phone against the wall and hang up. He said that he was taking care of something "kind of important". Well la de fucking da. What about every other goddamned time he's talking to his friends or posting? is that kind of important too? because gee, somehow i thought that girlfriends were supposed to be a little more important than a fucking IM. if someone calls that you care about, wouldnt it be nice if you could tear yourself away from the keyboard for ten minutes? all i could think was, is this how it's going to be next year? every time i call am i going to have to compete with the internet? it was just so ironic, that i had come to such a positive conclusion the night before, and then to come home to this shit. and then he acted all shocked that i would be so upset.

im going to try to forget this. harry potter rules!!

Orientation is tomorrow. I'm all excited. heehee. I'm looking forward to seeing Captain Chris at some point. alison devine will be there, but i doubt i'll see her. harry potter comes out on friday, which is sweet...i guess im dressing up since everyone else is.
there is a song called the politics of dancing. why dancing? there are so many other applications! being a teenager in this day and age practically qualifies you for the fucking united nations.
i want to read dante again. it begins

"Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost..."

The book i read today, the dante club, made an interesting observation....though this poem is entirely in first person, the very first line uses the inclusive pronoun "our". Dante draws the reader into the experience even before it unfolds. i never usually imagine the classical authors writing with an eye to their audiences. somehow i percieve them to have been writing for themselves, being self-encompassed in their own genius to the point where the acceptance or understanding of others would have been secondary to their joy in their craft. but he wrote for others, so that those who had similarly lost their path could see the light of his shining hope, and perhaps percieve their own beatrice guiding them through the travails of modern life. of course, i see no point in deifying a man who was obviously also quite bitter over his expulsion from florence. his treatment of his enemies in hell is quite indicative of his passion in that respect....yet he also places an Alighieri relative among the Traitors, so he was not entirely acting out of spite, perhaps...
sometimes famous people just don't exist for me. they are merely a name on the paper, a byline, a six-sentence biography. sometimes i feel the desire to walk the ground they walked, to drink from their rivers and pluck fruit from their trees, and try to see what they saw in the world. there was an article in the paper about physicists determining the exact spot and time and date in Provence that Van Gogh painted a picture of a rising moon. they stood on that ground and looked through his eyes. i want to see through dante's eyes. i want to see hell. i want to climb to heaven and have beatrice take me by the hand. i want to believe that this journey will end like his.

I DO NOT WANT TO WORK TONIGHT. sigh. but heather and melissa are going to come visit me before we close so that we can hang out and so that the guys may ogle them as usual. i bet they'll love jessi and jess lol. tanning didnt work out today, no fucking sun, damn it. i'll try tomorrow by myself in my backyard. that fails, hello milano's. ummm i have nothing to read...argh, homey. i was reading candide last night at work and everyone was giving me really weird looks because i kept saying it wasnt for school, i was really just reading it. i should probably call fairfield and find out what time i have to be there on thursday, or something. i actually had some fun with nicole at heather's shindig so maybe i'll see her around at school.

Yay! Look who's going to The Beach tomorrow! except it's not a real beach but melissa's grandpa's pool, but what the hell. i need a tan. time to destroy some of my DNA...but then again that's why we have little proofreaders in there anyway....put em to good use, right?
Harry potter soon!

Heather's grad party was last night....it was a lot of fun. there was coning, and xtreme volleyball, and hot tubs, and make-your-own-sundae, and we went and visited greg's house at midnight so melissa could finally meet him and stroke his chest. i realized that jess stone doesn't hate me like i always thought she did, and that dee is cool! i even had fun with random people like pam, reminiscing about st gabe's days, and nicole, thinking about our bright and glorious future together at fairfield. orientation is thursday! im so excited! i have to be there at 9! dammit!
hilary and julie didnt bother to show up or even tell heather they couldn't come. real nice. i didnt bring heather a gift, oops, but melissa made her this awesome collage that had just about anyone heather has ever associated with on it! it's amazing! i have to make one for my dorm room, man, so people know i have friends. in other news, heather has set each of us on the scent to track her down some dating material before she leaves for disney. one week, my minions!

"ROAD WORK AHEAD". Thus read the 4 BY 4 sign that we stole from the Mecca of traffic goodies tonight. The damn thing was so huge it barely fit in the back of my car, which is saying something. it was immediately used to add to the preexisting decorations on jess stone's car, whcih was sitting at the averys' house.

I got my first real cone tonight! stole it from katie's house on the way home because she didnt appear to plan to use it for coning.

Oh and met sara's new boyfriend tyler. well he wasnt her boyfriend till after we met him, but whatever. he reminds me of a hybridization of pete and aaron....unfortunately like steve of "follow your nose" fame, he cannot drive, and sara's mom is being prickly about letting her use the car. sucks.

im tired as all hell now. i got like four hours sleep because i got in at 2 and then kept thinking about the ending of the Ring and then had to wake up at 730 and never got back to sleep. poo.

the new heather language is now a mix of gangsta and piratical terms, such as "holla back, matey!" and "ar, my homey". lol

went underwear surfing with heather at victoria's secret! SALE! cute new bra! heather got a miracle bra...like the gal needs a miracle for the Grand Tetons? :-)

Yay it worked! i was about to find myself a new home and that would have been a pain in the ass.

last night was fun, even though we didn't win the trivia game. we were pretty close, though, and cmon, who the hell reads danielle steele and goes to hooters? that question was impossible. humorously, we saw mr prezch there from northwest. he goes every wednesday. he said he was glad we'd graduated cause now he can let loose. apparently teachers like doing that; jessi told me mrs oberg threw a party for her theater class and they all got drunk together. and kaplan, we know that story, right? *shakes head* anyway, justin and bill showed up once again, along with this guy jay who turned out to be 22. that's pretty funny when you consider that khara's little bro was also there, and he's thirteen. i don't know why he came, exactly, he didn't look to be having too much fun. khara's mom came too after a while. we went back to khara's house to watch the ring, which was a pretty scary fucking movie and then i had to drive home all by myslef and i kept thinking there was something in the back of my car about to kill me. stupid, i know, but i managed to scare myself shitless. oh and melissa gave me a tutorial on how to have sex in the backseat of a car, me playing the guy unfortunately. heather was seriously pimping herself out last night lol with all three guys. she just needs to make that leap, you know, she's already got all the "moves". however she was very useful in that she kept making it clear that i had a boyfriend, which kept that bill guy away. *shudder* good lord. he wanted to drive me back to khara's and so i quickly latched on to jessi. emily assured me that bill's very nice and would never try anything, but hey, i know that at least if jessi tried something on me, it wouldn't be the first time, right? plus i'm just not stupid. i was not raised to go catch a ride with some kid i've only met twice who is so much stronger than me. he showed off by lifting various people horizontally above his head. i refused, being afraid of heights.

Anyway it was all in good fun....i have fun with those set of people in a different way than with my own little group. i mean, i can't really picture myself getting dorky with them like i do with meghan or ashley or something, or having our group's long "deep" discussions that i've had with various persons. but it's still fun to be outrageous and grab your own boobs at times. it's all good.

Let's try this thing again and see if it works. Stupid upgrades.

Oh my...people who refuse to use proper grammar on computers frustrate me. There's something aesthetically displeasing to me about seeing "How r u?" and "2 good 2 b tru" show up on my screen. it's the demise of the english language, i tell you. forget spanglish, we need to worry about internetish.

Ah, so Blogger has so generously decided to become functional once again. how nice of it.

last night i read a novelette by ayn rand called anthem. it was very very short, sort of on the cusp between short novel and a long short story. anyway, it was set in a distant future where alll sense of personal identity has been abolished, and everyone is allowed to speak only in terms of the great WE. they're not allowed to live for themselves, only for and through the goodwill of all their brothers. it's very futuristic and interesting, and the basic plot is the one guy, Equality 55 75 or some other number (no one has a real name), is different from the others, which is a crime, but he figures out a whole bunch of stuff and escapes and founds a new city where men worship themselves, not each other. and he finds out the sacred word, which will get you killed if you say it aloud-- Ego. Not ego in the selfish megalomaniac kind of way, but its original freudian meaning, the actual self identity of man, which should never be sacrificed to the common good. anyway, i reccomend this short little novel. easy to read and makes you think. best kind. of course, those with strong grammatical backgrounds will wince at the use of prounouns; in describing another person, rand would say "they has red hair" because every person is a "we", and not one individual. it's weird.

possibly going to hooters tonight. i hope we actually make it ther this time!

Well, I had one stress-free day with no mother, sister, or dog. Needless to say, it was one of the best days I've had in months. I came home to a quiet house with some takeout from work, had a leisurely meal, then read for a few hours, then watched a movie until it was time for the agency. this morning i slept until noon with no dog to be let out and no sister to be driven to work. i stayed in a bathrobe until 4 15 when i got ready for work. utter and complete bliss.

and now they're all back.

I got up early today to go the book sale in west hartford....and got the following:
The Godfather : a newer edition than the cracked one i had
The Anthem, by Ayn Rand: i've heard this is a good book
The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis: I've read these before, they're excellent.
Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters: these poems are just so good. so damn good.
Three little books on art in spain, one on Goya, one on Velasquez, and one on El Escorial, that place we visited up in the mountains with the coffin room.
Descartes' Discourse on the Method: read this last year, got confused by it, thought i'd read it again.
Candide by Voltaire: one of the best satires ever written....i thought my edition was bad, turns out it wasn't, so now i have two in great condition. anyone want one?
a book called the fencing master, it looked pretty good, said it was a times bestseller
Catch 22 by joseph heller: this has been on my "to read" list for a long time, and now it is mine...
Bullfinch's mythology: good reference text. bought this for the same reason i bought bertrand russel's guide to philosophy, just in case i need it.
to dance with kings, by rosalind laker: i love her books. she writes about france during the courts of the great kings...most of my favorite novels are historical fiction. i usually like them with some element of mysticism or magic in them, so they're real and yet not, but this one is actually straight hist fic during the court of the sun king, my very favorite ruler of all...
I also bought a book of Milton, probably for reference, a book called the cat who came for christmas (purchased solely because the back said it would describe the cat's encounters with various personages, including george c. scott and CARY GRANT!), and a book called the emperor of the air, oh and the gulag archipelago part two, by solzhenitsyn, simply because i felt in an odd way that i owed it to the man...i wrote a paper on him this year, about his fight for truth and justice. i really respect what he did, in reconstructing the ghosts of a past everyone else just wanted to forget. millions of people, dead at the hands of a power crazed paranoiac, and so few wanted to confront the reality of it all. it made the holocaust look like a car accident, and yet there is so little public knowledge of the atrocities committed by this man against his own people. all in the name of ideology.

anyway good times with book buying! my mom rolled her eyes at the sight of all of them..and, as i knew she would, launched a speech about why we should not keep my dad's books. sigh.

Woke up this morning to the shocking realization that---I don't miss it at all. hahaha. heather said she dreamt of school last night. i didn't. we'll see everyone again at thanksgiving but until then, au revoir.

so i feel like i'm drowning in the minutae of everyday life here. i think i may very well begin to live at the library. soon i will have a toothbrush and an extra pair of underwear there, and perhaps after that a sleeping bag, a flashlight, and some non-perishable food. the people who work there know me so well i doubt it would surprise them if i simply never left one day. or maybe, having exhausted the resources of windsor, i'll transfer my attentions over to west hartford. i've never felt much affinity for bloomfield. then again, something about west hartford is unappealling. it's unfamiliar, but not in the exciting way. so i might wind up a homeless library liver. maybe i'll just stay here after all?

still, visiting the library today gained me the book i've been wanting to read all year--red rabbit, the latest tom clancy. i'm about 150 pages in, and there's more than 600, so i've a ways to go. but it's interesting, very interesting. no other author could be so informative about the stifling bureaucracy and utter incomprehsibility of communist ideology. although i've noticed that in some small points he'll repeat himself, when he's relating some little piece of background information that you should know. like early in the book he decribes the new nanny for Ryan's kids, the daughter of a south african minister who has to be checked out or "vetted" by CIA and SIS, the british agency. then a hundred pages later, she finally enters the story, and he repeats the same info about her almost word for word. it's strange. i wonder if he had the character filled out in his mind and then forgot that he described her already? who knows.

book sale tomorrow in west hartford. yipee! there's almost nothing i love more than acquiring books, although i am so out of room for them. i even went through and picked out some books that i either didn't like or never read and never will, and donated them to the library, but that only gained me about a foot of space. all the other bookshelves are filled with my dad's technical sciencey books ,and if i make one peep about them my mom will seize the opportunity to junk them. only my insistence has protected them thus far, and i only protect them because, in one of the queer actions that my sister later declared to be prescient knowledge of his own death, my dad asked me a few weeks before he died to keep his all of his manuals and books safe in case anything ever happened to him. it was around this same time that he showed me which key on his keyring unlocked his gun cabinet, another thing that struck me as odd at the time. he said it was if i ever needed to get them for some reason, though if he meant protection, they would have done me little good since they were all unloaded. if there was someone in the house, what are the chances i could have gotten his keys, opened the heavy cabinet, found the right bullets for the right gun and then loaded it in the dark? please, i would have just locked myself in the bathroom. much easier and probably safer.

anyway, off to write emails.

I'm not going to say anything about graduation. I refuse to dwell on what happened, what didn't happen, or what might have been. fuck it. high school's over, and i didn't really want to see most of those people again anyway. It's over. Ok I will say this about graduation--when we went up there, waiting for the ceremony to begin and everyone started crying in anticipation, all i was thinking was "it's about goddamned time."

However, the night before graduation is something I'll dwell on!! i finally realize why heather has so much fun hanging out with khara and jess and melissa. even though we didn't make it to hooters, it was such a total blast. emily ended up bringing a very attractive friend, justin, who in turn called a friend to tel him that he was the only guy with seven girls, so of course this other kid came running. we ended up wandering around khara's neighborhood playing some twister and then truth or dare. and, as in any gathering where there are horny persons of the opposite sex, there was flirting and groping and innuendos out the ying yang. mostly it was jessi and melissa vying over who would get down justin's pants. melissa was nice and eventually gave jessi a dare to kiss him, which is exactly what jessi wanted....poor melissa. then there was the requisite flashing and naked jogging, guys weaing bras and girls touching their boobs. a carload of drunken guys who live near khara tried to pick us all up to play beer pong. im not really sure what that is, but we declined, though khara looked like she wanted to say yes. justin invited us all to his houseboat on friday night, but i'm not really too interested in going...it's main feature is two bedrooms.hmmmm what possible purpose would there be in going to a place with two bedrooms? gee! yeah there was this definite separation between me, lindsey, khara and jess stone, who all have boyfriends, and then everyone else who didnt and was therefore up for grabs. but it was still fun to flirt anyway. apparently the other guy, bill, was attracted to moi, as ferreted out by melissa. i felt kind of bad for him. he wasn't very attractive, and he reminded me of aaron meadows, with the muscles and all. blech. i like my men short and scrawny thank you. speaking of which, we coned greg's car in the dead of night. :-) ah, fun times. i kept trying to give heather interesting dares, like kissing a girl, kissing a guy, groping a guy, but she didn't want to grope anyone and she "pecked" justin and jessi. amazingly enough, even i got some action last night! with not one, but TWO DeLeons! i think it was kind of harder kissing jessi because i've been closer to her. melissa was good, we were joking that we would both pretend the other one was greg and go from there. never kissed anyone with a tongue piercing before, but now that i've kissed two, i can say that they are weird as hell. it's like this random hard thing right in the middle of the other person's tongue, like a tumor. lol melissa was worried after that she was going to get me in trouble with greg, and i assured her that i really don't think he'll mind. hey, i would have no problems if he were off kissing guys. although i'd wanna be there. i tried getting justin and bill to go at it, but apparently they were very close friends and adamantly refused. shucks.that would have been like a perfect evening!

well it's late, i'm exhausted, and i should probably go to bed. i never would have lasted on the cruise anyway. what i want more than anything right now is to talk to greg, but he's not going to come online if he hasn't already by now

I've decided not to wait. Goodnight, world.

Tired....so tired...and wondering whether I should try to keep my eyes open in case greg steals online later. I did that last night, watching Bringing Up Baby with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, which is a very good movie, but he didn't come online. I could watch another movie, I have The Bishop's Wife (also a Cary Grant one) and Amadeus, because Rae has been extolling its virtues, but I have graduation practice tomorrow, and possibly a haircut as well. Yet I'm lonely, because I miss having a boyfriend that I'm actually allowed to talk to and hang out with.

Will it ever stop raining? Now rain is predicted for my graduation. Maybe we will ride to the cathedral in an ark, and choirs of nightingales will attend the ceremony, piping quietly from the balcony in the back. But there will be no room for the elephants and tigers, with all the relatives crammed in. They will simply have to listen from the street, and huddle under umbrellas as best they can.

Today a group of women came into Sofia's for a gathering. there were thirty of them, all in red hats and purple clothes. thirty old women in scarlet hats and purple clothes. they were members of the society of the red hat, which is an social group for old ladies to get together and gossip and be bawdy. it's based on this poem by jenny joseph:

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple

with a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

and satin candles, and say we've no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired

and gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

and run my stick along the public railings

and make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

and pick the flowers in other people's gardens

and learn to spit.



You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

and eat three pounds of sausages at a go

or only bread and pickles for a week

and hoard pens and pencils and beer nuts and things in boxes.



But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

and pay our rent and not swear in the street

and set a good example for the children.

We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?

So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

heehee. the old ladies were very nice, and some of the hats, i must admit, were fascinating.

i'm buying myself a new toy online, yay...well i will be, once my mom comes home so i can use her credit card. haha i'd tell rae now that i'm getting one before her--and it's a cool sounding one, too--but she's not currently on her screen name. oh well. tomorrow is another day. damn things take two weeks to get here from california. i want to play NOW!

Today was our senior outing at High Meadow in granby. it was ok, although there wasn't really a whole lot to do besides wander around or sit in the sun. We got our yearbooks, which turned out really well. unfortunately, there's not a single picture of me in the entire thing besides my awful senior photo, not even in the club pages because i was absent on club day. yipee.

i don't really have anything to do tonight, not that i have any energy to do anything with. i sort of have a much smaller social life now that greg is housebound for god knows how long. i might be going to the diner with sara tomorrow night, i don't know....we were there just last night, though. it was after awards night. i won a bunch, the only ones im really happy about are the plaques for english and biology. i did so well in both those subjects. oh and i got fifty dollars for working on voices for four years muahaha. my spanish class is getting to watch selena in spanish. mrs barret lied and told us the juniors were going to have to review grammar for a month. bastards.

there were so many hot guys at high meadow today! scott's inscription in my yearbook encouraged me to pick up tons up hot guys at parties in college. i laughed and had to tell him that i wouldnt be picking up anyone...im picked up and spoken for. it's weird but sometimes i wish i could do it over again with greg in a different way, not because it should have been different, but just for that initial thrill of not knowing the other person, not knowing what's going to happen. instead of meeting at sara's house or at the play, meeting him at a park or a concert, with no one to introduce us, and just having to wing it. i think i like things dangerous. it was the whole manuel thing that corrupted me, of course. what higher adventure can there be for a teenager than meeting a guy in another country who doesnt even speak your language and making out with him in his hotel room? (this is the part where i curse myself once again for being a stupid little sophomore who was so worried the teachers would catch her that she ran away far too soon.) when i think back on him i always smile, and then i shake my head in awe at my own daring. didn't know i had it in me, and i almost didnt....maybe i wouldnt have done it if meredith hadn't been around, rubbing off on me like some dark fairie dust. it was because he said i was beautiful, really...i had never believed anyone who said that before that point, and i didn't believe a lot of people who said it after, until greg. i don't know why i believed it. something in his eyes made me realize he meant it, even though hilary had to tell me what he'd said. i still have his address written on a scrap of paper that's jammed behind a picture frame that, amusingly, holds a picture of me and greg at last year's prom. i think i didn't want to put it in my box for fear it would be lost. it's so small. maybe someday i'll go to sevilla. i never saw it, but it's supposed to be a beautiful city. maybe i'll look him up, even though he'll have grown up and moved away by then. i've had dreams where i walk through madrid and meet him again, though we don't realize it at first.....when i wake sometimes i think how ironic it would be if he was actually my soul mate, and we met at so young an age like ships literally passing in the night. when i woke the next morning he was gone. i never even knew if they won the championship, but for manuel's sake, i hope they did.

High school is over, as of today. Had some fun exchanging honks and middle fingers with heather on the way home. me, her and adam engaged in a musical horn ensemble at a stoplight, and the guy stuck in the middle of us was laughing like he'd never seen hyperactive teenagers before. it was slightly sad pulling out of the parking lot with all the teachers waving at us, knowing that i'll never be their students again.

i just finished dissembling my beloved backpack. minus all the patches and safety pins, it looks limp and forlorn, adorning the trash can. it looks so ordinary. for two years i've always been able to spot my backpack, anywhere, because it was so darn colorful. even the safety pins, which were originally put there only to keep my backpack together and not as a fashion statement like everyone thought, were familiar to me. if someone's skirt was falling apart, they always came to me to ask for a pin. it was useful. now everything is out of it, and im slowly collecting a pile of junk that i will no doubt be saving. like the note heather gave me in math class after graham asked her to the prom in music theory. my detention from senora barret. multitudinous notes from meghan, pictures jessi gave me, those lollipop condoms that have been in my backpack for months. i said goodbye to my locker today, too, A113. and a not-so-fond farewell to my hated calculus book. muahahaha.

tomorrow night is the award ceremony, the last one i will ever have to sit through. i wonder what i'm getting this year, aside from the voices award and getting called up for graduating with honors. i'd love to get the ap english award, but we had a lot of good students in our class...cross my fingers. other than that, i can't think of what i've really excelled in. spanish, maybe, but meg bonney is always really good too. i only get A minuses, she gets As. bio, meh, probably not, we were all smart there.....haha no hill awards....math not a chance in hell...oh well. i really don't care. we're done. little pieces of paper are unimportant. yet i have a memory of what must have been freshman or sophomore year and rae being upset because she didn't win as many awards as her parents wanted her to. then i saw her mom and she looked all annoyed. weird memory.

High school is over, as of today. Had some fun exchanging honks and middle fingers with heather on the way home. me, her and adam engaged in a musical horn ensemble at a stoplight, and the guy stuck in the middle of us was laughing like he'd never seen hyperactive teenagers before. it was slightly sad pulling out of the parking lot with all the teachers waving at us, knowing that i'll never be their students again.

i just finished dissembling my beloved backpack. minus all the patches and safety pins, it looks limp and forlorn, adorning the trash can. it looks so ordinary. for two years i've always been able to spot my backpack, anywhere, because it was so darn colorful. even the safety pins, which were originally put there only to keep my backpack together and not as a fashion statement like everyone thought, were familiar to me. if someone's skirt was falling apart, they always came to me to ask for a pin. it was useful. now everything is out of it, and im slowly collecting a pile of junk that i will no doubt be saving. like the note heather gave me in math class after graham asked her to the prom in music theory. my detention from senora barret. multitudinous notes from meghan, pictures jessi gave me, those lollipop condoms that have been in my backpack for months. i said goodbye to my locker today, too, A113. and a not-so-fond farewell to my hated calculus book. muahahaha.

tomorrow night is the award ceremony, the last one i will ever have to sit through. i wonder what i'm getting this year, aside from the voices award and getting called up for graduating with honors. i'd love to get the ap english award, but we had a lot of good students in our class...cross my fingers. other than that, i can't think of what i've really excelled in. spanish, maybe, but meg bonney is always really good too. i only get A minuses, she gets As. bio, meh, probably not, we were all smart there.....haha no hill awards....math not a chance in hell...oh well. i really don't care. we're done. little pieces of paper are unimportant. yet i have a memory of what must have been freshman or sophomore year and rae being upset because she didn't win as many awards as her parents wanted her to. then i saw her mom and she looked all annoyed. weird memory.

I've read three books in the past few days: Michael Crichton's Airframe, Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. they were all very different books. airframe was very technical, very well-researched, and engrossing. harris' book was very intriguing, but more in terms of character development, or should i say character revelation, as most of the tale is told in flashback. the hitchhiker's guide was amusing in the sardonic way it treats lifeand the Big Questions of the universe. I also got the sequel, the restaurant at the end of the universe, which i plan to read tomorrow since i only have two periods of school before i'm done with high school. oooh and a new book of billy collins' poetry. well not entirely new, it's "selected and new poems" which means it has my favorites from all his books in there! i wants it, i wants it! except that it's twenty two dollars for a pretty slim volume. i'm notoriously cheap when it comes to buying books. i consider them a good buy only if they're inexpensive. i consider paying more than twenty dollars for a book outright fleecing, and only for harry potter will i stomach it. the thought of paying a lot of money for a book that i don't know that i'll like or will have a satisfactory ending, one which i may never read again, is not to my liking. i buy books that i already know i love and would like to have permanently in my possession, like harry potter, howl's moving castle, the oracle glass, the master of all desires, the last don.

but i love billy collins, i truly do....he is my number one favorite poet. i used to love ee cummings, and before that ae housman, and then tennyson, and i still like them, but collins' poetry uses the most mundane images in the most extraordinary ways it just hits me like nothing else i have ever read. oh well--i'll put it on the List of Things to Tell People to Buy Me When Gift-Giving Occasions Occur and I Am Out of Ideas. i dont have one of those, but now i do!

So here I am, trying to pick out classes for next year and really wishing that I could call greg up and ask his opinion on everything, but I can't because his father is a royal dick. I read his xanga today and it made me sad, not because of what it said but because of the feelings behind it. I'm sorry that he has to go through all this, that he has to be made a prisoner in his own house. That's just not right. I don't agree at all with the way his dad treats him. if greg hates school, i'll bet a lot of it is thanks to mr paul and his crazy ideas. I know greg is intelligent, and he can do well if he wants to. He just needs to find out what he wants to be doing, on his own time, and not at the behest of hitler.

when i think about greg and his father, sometimes i think of my dad and what he would have said about all of this. he probably would have agreed with mr paul and grounded him for those grades. not even the programming classes; if he brought home that C in math, all hell would have broken loose. heehee. greg got a better grade than i will in math! if dad knew what im getting in calculus i bet he'd have a heart attack and die all over again. we can't all be math geniuses, dad. sorry. i get the sense that my dad would have done much the same as greg's if i were to be in his position. of course, my dad's version of childrearing was such that that wouldn't happen. he'd never let it get that far, and as his daughter now i would never let it get that far. i think if i failed something, i would be haunted by the thought of his disappointment in me. i think after the fiasco of my dad's first year in college, failing was never an option for him. which made the rest of his life so much harder, never being able to accept that he couldn't go as high as he wanted to. i have long resolved not to let my limitations eat me alive. all the money in the world will never make up for the joy of being loved. i hope my dad never lost sight of that, but i sense that he was embittered by the struggles in his professional life. he was never a failure in any sense, and i hate the thought that perhaps he died thinking that he was. not true. just not true. i loved him, and i love greg, no matter what happens or what he chooses.

perhaps the beginning of my dad's college career is portentous. he was a brilliant student in high school, but he ended up partying his first year at Lowell and failed right out. my grandpa made him spend all summer painting houses. when he went back, he was on the dean's list until graduation. my dad only told me this once, and i honestly could not believe that my straight arrow father, who railed at my sister for getting bad grades in math and for not being an all A student, flunked out of college. i laughed. it was incredulous. he hated it if i referred to it casually, especially in public. i think it must have shamed him, that memory of his initial failure. i asked once if this meant that i would have one year to screw around with in college, and he just glowered at me. guess that was a no.

Rae told me a quote she might use in her valedictory address, i forgot the person: "If you want to be happy, be."

The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Wallace Stevens

I'll admit to not being entirely conscious of the meaning of all these lines...but it gives me a picture, and it's one I like.

Today is my last full day of classes at Northwest. Yipee! After today, no more biology for me. I've thrown out my lab notebook, disemboweled my AP review book, and trampled upon my stupid lab goggles that made us look like giant insects. muahahaha. there will also be no english for me after friday! i'm out of her excruciatingly long exam. yes, there will be a hill exam, but only for one of the two periods. the second period we're having a party! spanish is still up in the air; i'll find that out today. math i obviously have to take, but i don't think im going to get a D in the class. oh and graduating with high honors only takes into account the first three quarters of senior year! score!

I love the way greg and I can have fun doing absolutely nothing...happiness can be a couple of couch pillows.

Frank O'Connor's short story "My Oedipus Complex" is so great! i would suggest that anyone read it....very clever. Also Saki's "Tobermory", which is about a cat belonging to some very shallow society folk who is taught to talk, and suddenly becomes a threat because of all the gossip he knows.

The Hollow Men

T. S. Eliot (1925)
I


We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar


Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;


Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.


II


Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.


Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --


Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom


III


This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.


Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.


IV


The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms


In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river


Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.


V


Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.


Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow


For Thine is the Kingdom


Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow


Life is very long


Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom


For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the


This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

That's just such a good poem....the first time it overwhelmed me. I didn't like his poem "the waste land", but this is just good...it's his condemnation of "subjective idealism", people who retreat from one another and put everything into abstractions and do nothing, until they are finally only hollow men. So good!

Skipped school yesterday to see the Matrix Reloaded with Ashley. It was entertaining in terms of Neo's attractiveness, some of the fight sequences, the amusing revelations about his true role as the One...or One of Many? As to the philsophy which fairly dripped from every character's mouth--it seems anyone with a bad accent and a penchant for verbosity can be a philosopher these days--I wasn't that impressed. Perhaps it was not the quality of what was said but the quantity of it. i felt as though whatever message the Wachowskis were trying to send was lost in the rubble of everything else they insisted on saying. Yes, causality is a conundrum that will make your head hurt if you think about it. Free will versus fate is mystifying. But maybe it's supposed to be. Or maybe saying that's the easy way out. Either way, I still found the movie to be somewhat less than the nirvanic experience other people have claimed it was. Of course, they think the rest of us are missing something. It could be true, or they could just be reading too much into it.

Or maybe I am just quick to be cynical about some people these days. It seems that if you really want to believe what someone says that they believe about themselves, and then it just turns out not to be so true after all, you have trouble believing them again....

Home and free and sister-less for the whole evening. Joy!

There was a woman in Sofia's today who had such a dark tan that I would have thought she was black except for her facial structure. Her boyfriend was lighter, but they both looked like they'd been cooking a little too long. I almost couldn't take my eyes off of her, I was so disgusted. It made me wonder if she just didn't know that she was causing possibly irreparable damage to her skin, or just didn't care? As we learned in bio, one of the ways a cancer starts is when a mutagen alters a certain kind of gene in a cell, an oncogene. Cancers don't just pop up from mutations in any gene; it has to be a gene that controls cell division or cell death. Once the mutagen hits an oncogene, it can become the proto-oncogene of a cancer, dividing at an incredibly swift rate with nothing to halt it. UV light is a mutagen; it changes the DNA in your skin cells. If the DNA in a cell is injured, there are little mechanisms that go and try to repair it. If it can't be repaired, the p53 gene is activated--the cell suicide gene--and the cell is instructed to self-destruct, and you wind up with a sunburn. But if the altered gene just happens to be p53, or a gene that tells cells to stop dividing, then you're in some serious trouble. It's like taking away the brake from your car. The cell will divide continuously and won't self-destruct, forming the mass of cells known as a tumor. There are hundreds of mutagens, including cigarette smoke and asbestos. I just could not believe that anyone would willingly bake themselves in the sun without sunscreen if they have any understanding of what that UV light could be doing to their cells. That's so idiotic. I'd rather be pale year round than have melanoma when I'm thirty. I think the same thing of the girls at school who spend so much money on tanning salons during the winter and before prom. It's crazy! If you're so desperate to look brown, go spend five bucks on some self tanner at CVS. or roll in the mud. whatever.