Dear Greg

I don't know how to solve the puzzle of you. You said that you thought about writing me a letter today but didn't. I'm writing you a letter but I just won't send it. I'm not even sure right now if I want you to know what it is that I'm going to write. I don't yet know what I'm writing; my hands are just sort of moving over the keys.
I understand what you said about seeing me everywhere. I find reminders of you all over the place. I haven't thrown out anything related to you or to us. I finally took down the last few pictures of you that were in my room here last night. There are still prom pictures up in my bedroom at home. Whenever I open my photo album, you're there on every page. The CD you made me is here, as is every card and note you ever wrote me. I would never discard any of this, if only because it reminds me of so many happy times. I saw my favorite picture of you, the one I took of you in my kitchen the day before you left for camp (or was it Philmont, I can't remember), in your hoodie and your old hat, and I smiled, even though part of me wanted to cry.
Part of me is also sorry that I blew up at you the last time we spoke. Another part of me isn't. I always tried to not get mad at you when we were going out, but it always came out in the end somehow. A lot of things about you always did frustrate me but I didn't want to make problems where there didn't need to be any. Once we started talking cordially again those things started to come back, and by that time I was obviously no longer constrained by any responsibility toward you. So I let myself get pissed off, and now we haven't spoken in weeks. Again I'm divided; part of me says fuck it, who cares, but another part of me just wishes that we could really be friends.
Do you see how this is a paradox? I can never reconcile the ways things are now with the way they used to be. I hate it that now I don't even speak to someone that I once cared so much for. I especially hate that I don't even know how this all happened. I've spent time trying to trace it back to where it started, when I started to not feel the way I had before. I'm sure you've figured out that there are still things that I've never told you, even after all this time. There's not many, really, but one thing I don't think you knew was that I was actually on the Pill for about eight months. There was a time when I was pretty much planning on having sex with you, so I thought it was a good idea. My not telling you was purposeful, so that you would always be cautious and not depend on it. Anyway one day I realized that I no longer had any desire to sleep with you, and that being on the Pill was a waste of money and effort, so I stopped. This was sometime in May, as far as I can remember. In retrospect, I probably should have given deeper consideration to the thought that I had no sexual desire concerning you, but I guess I chalked it up to just not wanting the trouble and ignored it. This isn't to say that I suddenly disliked you or anything. I had a lot of amazing times with you towards the end of senior year and over the summer. I had a million doubts about staying together with you in college, but I tried to put them aside. Do you remember a sort-of fight we had the day after i came back from FU orientation, about you talking to people online while you were on the phone with me? I bet you thought i was irrationally upset about it, but not only was that something that had annoyed me for a long time, i had also reached the epiphany the day before while here at fairfield (in campion, no less) that i could do it, that we'd make it, and i returned home just full of happiness at the thought of you, and then.....that happened. it was just sort of of set-down. i still had hope though. it was really only after i got here, and was separated from you, that i realized that i thought of you in exactly the same sense as sara or rae or heather. i only missed you like i missed a friend, and not someone who meant something more. the end result of this all was obviously us breaking up. then that ridiculous business with andrew. if you ever feel the need to be malicious, just know that that brief mistake is probably going to haunt me for a very long time here. it's often made me laugh, the irony that a guy i was involved with for less than a month causes me more perpetual problems than someone i dated for a year and a half.
you should also know that i consider that year and a half to be a really wonderful time in my life. i wouldn't exchange the memories for anything, hence why i'll keep everything that reminds me of you. i want to remember you; you were my first love. no matter what came after, no matter if we never speak to each other again.
as to that, i don't know what to do or say. it's obvious that we have such hugely disparate viewpoints on a lot of things, especially education. i can't help feeling frustrated and angry as i watch you throw away all the opportunities you've been handed. You repeat over and over on your site that you "do nothing". That's what i can't stand. I can't stand watching you do nothing and just live life in a dull cycle. See, I already feel the frustration rising in me as I write this. this is why i don't know if we can or should be friends. we'll never agree on this. you'll always feel like i'm trying to impose my views on you, and maybe you think that i follow the crowd because i consider college the best, if not only, route to a good future, but that's what i believe.
i'm trying to think if there's anything else i should say here. probably, because believe it or not i do think of you a lot of the time. like i said, there are reminders of you everywhere. i really hope, for you sake, that you do something, anything to break the pattern you're in. i also hope that we'll be friends again someday.
The first paper we ever wrote for HILL class was on the book "The Secret to Staying in Love", which incidentally i think you still have. Mr Tressler told us to analyze some of our own love relationships, and of course I chose you. I mentioned that some people are of the opinion that teenagers aren't capable of being in love because they're not mature enough, but I loved you, so I knew that couldn't be true. The conclusion I came to was that I loved you as much as I could, and that while I knew we would not always be together, and that while ours wasn't a mature, adult love because we were not mature adults, it was still something incredibly valuable. i still believe that.

How do I sign this? Love, I suppose,

Michelle

So my valentine's day plans have been finalized, thanks to my timely intervention lol! instead of the traditional dinner date, charles and i are doing something that's (in my opinion) much more fun. we're getting a hotel suite!!! heeheee!
before anyone starts hyperventilating and getting the wrong idea, there's not going to be wild monkey sex going on as per mutual agreement (though wendy has been admonishing me to 'not waste the opportunity'). however, he IS going to be cooking me dinner (it comes with a kitchen like the new year's one!). it has a vcr so we can watch movies, and we're going to have a scrabble rematch since he beat all of us when he visited last time, and then we're going to, well have some good times. muahaha. oh and he's bringing champagne, so i shall at last know what it's like!
honestly i felt so "adult" somehow when i was making the reservations last night. turns out my check card can be used like a credit card to reserve hotel rooms, and orbitz.com is just awesome, i must say. anyway we're splitting the cost down the middle, and it's more expensive than the plain old hotel room i originally suggested but it's going to be so much cooler. just the thought of having absolutely no one around, being able to do whatever we want as loud as we want, is fucking awesome. the only downside is checkout being noon, so no sleeping in, but oh well, i can deal, right?

when i woke up this morning and remembered that the night before i had booked a suite for frickin' valentine's day, you know what i did? i burst out laughing, that sort of giddy excited laughter that is quite a lot of fun and really gets you going in the morning! i got screwed out of valentine's day last year but this year IT IS GOING TO FUCKING ROCK!!

oh yes, and debate tomorrow, and seeing my girl flanny! SWEET!

1. What time is it?: 4:09
2. Full Name: Michelle Marie DiMarzo
3. Nicknames: Bob, shelley, shell-belle, mitch
4. Date of birth: 10/01/85
5. Where do you live?: Windsor and Fairfield
6. What school do you attend?: Fairfield University
7. Siblings and their ages?: Jen, 21
8. Pets?: 3 cats, 1 dog
9. Lefty or Righty?: Lefty

**YOUR LOOKS**

10. Hair color? Dark brown
11. Eye color?: brown
12. Height?: 5'2"
13. Do u wear contacts or glasses?: contacts
14. Do you have any piercings?: yes - ears
15. Where do you want more if you do?: nope
16. Do you have a tattoo?: no
17. If so what and where?: n/a
19. Do you have a certain fashion you follow: not really

**JUST LATELY** >

21. How are you today?: PMSy
22. What pants are you wearing right now?: pjs
23. What shirt are you wearing right now?: sweatshirt
25. What does your hair look like at the moment?: ponytail
26. What song are you listening to right now?: none
27. What was the last thing you ate?: sugar babies
28. How is the weather right now?: raining
29. Last person you talked to on the phone?: Mom
30. Last Dream you can remember?: something weird
31. Who are you talking to right now?: no one
32. What time is it?: they asked this already

**More about YOU!** >

33. What are the last four digits of your phone number?: 6889
34. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?: cerulean blue
35. Have you ever almost died?: yes, when my mom drove my truck too fast in the snow and we spun around and hit the concrete barrier thingee twice
36. Do you like the person that sent you this?: I stole it from Lauren, so yes
37. How do u eat an Oreo?: whole
38. What makes you happy?: friends, books, charles
39. What's the next CD you are going to buy?: ha, buy a cd?
40. What's the best advice ever given to you?: always do your best….cliched, but my dad taught me that
41. Have you ever won any special awards?: yes
42. What are your future goals?: win the nobel prize, what else?
43. Do you like to dance?: no.
45. What's the stupidest thing you ever done/said?: I’ll give you a hint, his initials are AF
46. What's your favorite memory?: times with my friends back home, memories of me and my family sitting around the dinner table cracking jokes about each other…turtle wax teehee
47. If you could change one thing about you what would it be?: legs
48. Where do you shop the most?: hot topic and salvation army, baby
49. How many kids do you want to have?: none
50. Sons?: none
51. Daughters?: none
52. Do you do drugs?: no
53. Do you drink?: not really
54. What kind of shampoo and conditioner do you use?: Suave and pantene
55. What sport do you hate the most?: football!
56. What are you most scared of?: bugs, heights
57. How many tvs are in your house?: three
58. Do you have your own phone line or cell phone?: yes
59. Do you sleep with stuffed animals?: not generally
60. Have you ever broken/sprained/or fractured a bone?: no
61. Who do you dream about?: the randomest oddest shit!
62. Who do you tell your dreams too?: anyone
63. Who's the loudest friend you have?: heather
64. Who's the quietest friend?: Meredith or rae

**Just Questions**

65. Is cheerleading a sport?: athletic activity, not a sport
66. How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?: no idea

**YOU and LOVE**

67. Do you believe in Love? yes
68. Do you have a girlfriend or boyfriend?: I prefer the term “significant other” and yes.
69. Do you have a crush? Always lol
70. Who is your crush?: philosophy boy, TFB, that guy down the hall with the glasses
71. Do you believe in love at first sight?: no
73. What song do you want played at your wedding?: unchained melody
74. What's the first thing you notice about the opposite sex?: smile, eyes
75. Longest crush: four years
77. Do you find yourself attractive?: on certain days—NOT TODAY
78. Do you find yourself ugly?: on some days, like today
79. Do others find you attractive?: some

**Which is worse?**

81. Making out with Marilyn Manson or Rob Zombie?: Marilyn Manson!!!
82. Having your tonsils or appendix removed?: tonsils

**FOR EVERYONE**


92. Cute n' mysterious or wild n' sexy: wild and sexy
93. Dark or blonde hair: dark hair
94. Long or short hair: long
95. Curly or straight hair: Straight
96. Color of eyes: brown
97. Long or short nails: long, natural
98. Hat or no hat: no hat
99. Good or bad: good
100. Hair up or down: down
101. Jewelry or none: jewelry
102. Tall or short: tall!
103. Accent or no accent: European accents….mrow
104. Pants or dress: pants
105. Tan or fair: fair
106. Glasses: never!
107. Pretty indoor or crazy party: pretty indoor
108. Freckles or none: none
109. Shy or outgoing: outgoing
110. Funny or always cool: funny
111. Talkative or shy: I talk too much
112. Who's your hottest friend?: I have so many, but Sara and Stoner

**Pick One: THIS OR THAT**

113. Lights on/off?: on
114. Do u like snow, sun or rain?: sun
115. Mickey D's (McDonalds) or BK (Burger King): none
116. Do u like scary or happy movies better?: happy, and im not afraid to admit it!
117. Backstreet Boys or NSYNC?: neither
119. Paper or plastic?: paper
120. Sausage or pepperoni?: neither, again
121. Summer or winter?: summer
122. Hugs or kisses?: hugs
123. Chocolate or white milk?: white
124. Root Beer or Dr. Pepper?: Root Beer
125. Glass half full or half empty?: half full
126. CD or Tape?: CD
127. Tape or DVD?: DVD
128. Cats or Dogs?: cat
129. Mud or Jell-O wrestling?: KYjelly wrestling
130. Vanilla or Chocolate?: vanilla
131. Skiing or Boarding?: neither
132. Day or night?: night
133. Cake or pie: cake
134. Silver or gold: silver
135. Diamonds or pearls?: diamonds
136. Sunset or sunrise? sunset

**Your FAVS**

137. Color?: blue
138. Food?: pasta
139. Fast food?: none
140. Candy?: milky way, rolos
141. Beverage?: Coke
142. Ice Cream Flavor?: chocolate fudge brownie
143. Sport?: basketball
144. Animal?: penguin
145. Fav. type of music?: many
146. Radio Station: 106.9 WCCC
147. Song: “Origin of Love”
148. Band: Perfect Circle, NIN, Tool
149. Number(s): 15
150. Fav. Actor or actress?: Johnny, John Cusack
151. Fav. day of the year?: my birthday
152. Fav. month?: October
153. TV Show?: simpsons, CSI
154. Store?: hot topic, borders
155. Scent?: uh, no preference
156. Teacher?: Fitz! Hahahaha yeah right. Hm….Mrs Juda, Mr T (a kink in the ointment)…
157. Game?: FF8
158. Saying?: er….i don’t know

**Have you EVER**

159. Loved somebody so much it made you cry?: when I lost them
160. Smoked?: no
161. Drank?: yes
162. Ever gotten dumped?: heehee no *knock on wood*
163. Broke the law?: yes
164. Ran from the cops?: no
165. Stole something?: no, well maybe when I was little
166. Lied: all the time
167. Made yourself throw up: bleh no
169. Made yourself cry to get out of trouble?: I tried once, icouldnt do it

**On a FiNal NoTe**

170. Do you like filling these out?: not really
171. How many people are you sending this to?: my site
172. Do u want your friends to write back?: sure
173. Who is least likely to respond?: don't really know
174. Who is most likely to respond?: don't really know
175. What time is it now?: 4:45 pm

sara, after being told that she is truly my wife, as opposed to certain mistresses: "i get all your shit when you die!"

sean: "lauren, are you saying that Tony D likes the big D?" (interpret this as you will)

sean and lauren, loudly, after i have discreetly passed a note to meredith indicating our beloved Philosophy Boy is sitting RIGHT BEHIND HER: "Philosophy boy? where? where? so this is the guy that you never skipped Long's class because of?

It's come to my attention that we here on C4 have a shitload of nicknames that other people miht be unfamiliar with. So, for clarification:

Myself: Mitch
Lauren Digiovine: Digiov
Amanda Popham: Popham, the forbidden "apop", Popham the Pure, The Pink Princess
Meredith Darts: Dahhhhhhhhhhts
Sean Gleason: Princess Pinky or Pinky Gleason
James Nguyen: Asian James or AJ
James Burns: Tall James or TJ
Andrew Fusco: Satan, the Evil One, or "ewwwwwww"

in other news, third eye blind is playing here in april! wheeee!

today i skipped work and spent a few hours in the library. i made a list of books i want to read now that i know where the library branches are, i read parts of a book on the "queens of the renaissance" (the only ones i was interested in were beatrice d'este and lucrezia borgia) and then i finished anna karenina. *spoilers ahead*

it's an awful thing to say, but by the end of the book i really hated anna. i knew beforehand what her fate was to be and by the last fifty pages i was just thinking "oh my god, stop being a tearful whiny bitch and throw yourself under the train already!" she turns from this kind, tragic beauty who you just want to love the moment she steps off the train fifty pages in, to this puling, selfish wreck of a woman that you're supposed to feel pity for, i think, but i just feel exasperated with. her jealousy toward her lover Vronsky, for whom she has given up her position in society and the son she claims to love but really doesn't, or at least not a good kind of love, is what really pissed me off. she basically stays in the house all day since society won't receive her and freaks out every time he goes out. she doesnt love the child they have together at all, and has made sure they won't have any more, and spends her time being tearful over her lost son (whom she ABANDONED with a father who didnt love him to be with her lover) or believeing that her lover is seeing other women. and the famous ending? they have a fight, he goes to his mother's, she believes there's someone else and throws herself under a train. she does this partly out of a belief there's no way out of her situaation (her husband won't give her a divorce so she can't marry vronsky) but mostly because, in her own words, she wants him to suffer and regret the pain he's caused her. she dies being malicious! it's awful! in the end he can't even remember their love, he can only remember how she died believing herself triumphant over him.

this digusted me, it really did. tolstoy told an excellent story, of which the anna karenina thread is really just the one story that ties all the others together in family and society. there's one very happy ending for one couple. but anna herself and the way she acted, the way she threw everything away for this "tragic, passionate love" and then ended up hating him and herself, made me so angry. the way she treated her children REALLY made me mad, pretending that Seryozha (her son) is her everything, then leaving him behind and not even missing him for months, and Vronksy thinking that it's awful of her to mention her son when they're reunited because how can she be possibly thinking of aught but him at such a time? then she has the little girl and realizes she doesnt love her at all. she just doesn't care. she says at one point she loves only two people, her husband and her son. hello, other child, with the man you suppposedly love? it was just very wrong.

then there's the love affair itself. yes she was in a bad position-- married to a cold man who didnt love her. she falls in love with vronsky, but it's all-consuming and they MUST be together! they must! they must sacrifice all and incur the wrath of society and abandon her child only to be miserable later on, they must they must! in my opinion, the far more noble sacrifice would have been to keep living with her husband, cold as he was, and raise the son, and maybe when he was older to run away, and keep the lover on the sly like everyone else in russia was doing. but no, she absolutely can't bear it. ok, so they run away, but then she's miserable because she can't get remarried without a divorce, and divorce means losing her standing in the society she eventually realizes that she craves. if she were really so strong and so in love, they could have sacrificed fucking society, gone abroad and settled in some town and been well-off bourgeois. but no, they need wealth and horse racing and expensive gowns to be "happy". so basically they're trapped, and cut off from genteel society, and they wind up not loving the other as much, anna bc she thinks she's sacrificed everything for a man who can leave her whenever he wants, and vronsky because she's so grasping and attached.

finally, her death. like so many suicides she realizes, too late, the horror of what she's done, and tries to save herself, but hey, once you're under the train you're pretty much done for. oops.

so this was my annoyed opinion of the end of anna karenina. don't get me wrong--amazing book, awesome characterization of russian society between the emancipation of the serfs and the revolution of 1919. i must admit i skipped tolstoy's deep parts where he expresses his views on religion and social classes in favor of the actual plot. if you can spare the time to read 900-odd pages or so, definitely do so lol.

i forgot to mention that charles makes me very happy. i thanked melissa tonight for basically being the catalyst in all of this and encouraging both of us. he even makes me happy after i've seen pictures of him in a tshirt and spandex shorts and another of him drunk and flashing his chest. whee.

i also forgot to mention that yesterday i took down all my pictures of greg that were still hanging around, as well as those of other people whom i no long feel merit space in my room. i put up a picture of sara in my tahoe holding my short-lived bamboo stick on my fridge and one of rae in her hoochie attire from the halloween party on the microwave. i'm sorry heather--you and greg pelvic thrusting had to go :-)

i also forgot to mention that this game is very addicting. it involves smacking penguins with a bat, don't ask.

I love iTunes, even though as yet I can only access meredith and sarah's stuff. right now i'm listening to loreena mckinnet off sarah's list--the girl has several hundred of really diverse awesome tunes, from mozart to fred astaire and chumbawumba! i remember chumbawumba! right now im trying to copy all my music files so other people can see them. more people need to get itunes around here. popham, digiov, i'm looking at you.

something happened tonight, just a little occurrence that left me frustrated and annoyed and i can't even write about it on here but it just made me wish that for once i was as callous as paris on gilmore girls and i could just call someone up and tell them in one terse sentence exactly how things stand between us and then hang up and not give a damn. it's not really a grrrr situation, more of a, i knew this would happen, go away situation.

i keep forgetting to make 11:11 wishes, i wanted to wish for sara's formal thing to go well this weekend. oh well, i wish it anyway.

i have no classes friday! math got canceled and we leave after noon for debate so no art history. and i'll see heather! sometime after 1am! i can't really go out with her or anything only because we have to be up wicked early the next day, and she has to put up people in her room so i cant stay with her either, and i also dont even have a sleeping bag which really sucks, but still, i'll get to see nyu. heehee.

create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

this is where i've been outside of the US at this point.

create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

and this is where i want to have been, twenty or thirty years from now. i have a lot of traveling to do!

there is almost nothing better than being online and being able to talk to both sara and rae at once, and feel almost like the old days, as though we're all fifteen miles apart instead of a hundred or so. it would have been really awesome if heather had been on too, but she hasn't been on AIM lately. i don't know why this struck me today, it just kind of did. i miss you girls a lot...not in a huge way like i cry over it or anything, but just a sort of quiet feeling that strikes me sometimes, like "gee, sara would think that's really funny", etc. maybe you guys feel like i always talk about my FU friends to you, but i realized the other day how much i bring you three up when i'm talking to my friends here. i can't help it; you guys were such a huge part of my existence pre-college. maybe it's a good thing, so when sara and rae eventually visit it won't be like they're people my friends here have never heard of. they'll be like ah, it's the girl who makes scarves and loves hello kitty, and the former x-phile with the younger man *wink* of course, you two are so much more than that. this mood might possibly be influenced by the fact that simon and garfunkel's "bridge over troubled water" is now playing. who knows.

i had a lot of fun last night. i'm really glad that my friends here approved of charles lol. that's usually a good sign! i'm also eagerly anticipating valentine's day. i wish people would get more into the idea of it, that there's an entire day dedicated to telling people that you care! who cares that hallmark and hershey and victoria's secret make a killing off this holiday? doesn't it make people feel so special to have someone else say to them "you're my friend, and i love you", and then hand them a little piece of cardboard with some silly sentiment on it? i know i love it *cheesy grin*

yes where was i? doing homework. must finish in time to see a bit of superbowl commercial fun.

Survival of the Fittest


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Untitled, Madrid

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

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

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


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

three guesses who this is about? lol

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

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

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

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

last night was amazing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ain't that the truth.

What Kind of Drunk Are You?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GO PROVIDENCE!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

some secret amplitude
seems to open in this orderly space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


~Mark Doty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i feel like shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i'm not doing new year's resolutions this year. my secret resolution has been the same every year for like the past three or four, and it hasn't changed, really, and i still haven't achieved it. the other ones are just things i write down in the vain hope something in me will change, that suddenly i will be able to weather jen's horrid behavior with good cheer, that my mom and i will miraculously concur on all things, that i will balance every aspect of my life perfectly, hurting no one. i'm not deluding myself this year. this day is no different than any other, aside from its cultural significance. the paths of the spheres do not abruptly alter course on january 1st, nor do the stars change their patterns. but life is not without hope; in fact it abounds. i can change my life on any day i wish.

who says you can only kiss ONE person at midnight on new year's eve? i mean, really, you have a whole MINUTE!

can you say "one-minute orgy"?

the book o' men is officially begun. only two entries thus far, one of which is my very favorite, a certain hottie from seville, but it's already not fit for other eyes. i'm including some of my cheesier feelings here, so it's going to be quite classified. i have the perfect hiding place, till i return to school and my lockbox...let us say that when my delightfully crafty grandfather built things, he liked to put secret compartments in them. i doubt my mom even remembers it's there, and she'd have no reason to go through the trouble of getting to it, so we're good.

this morning i had my nitrous oxide experience at the dentist, and it was NOT as cool as last time because he said i didn't really need to be all the way gone so he didn't put it on as strong. so i got all tingly, and the room was very shiny and the cars outside seemed to be going faster than usual, or maybe they were just speeding? i couldn't help smiling, not because i was happy, but because the chemical does something to cause your facial muscles to contract. that's what they told me, anyway. not the relaxing mind-trip of last time, but fun nonetheless.

today i will work on my scrapbook, and play final fantasy, and read. i realized during one art history class that i don't remember the titles of all the books i've read in the past six months, there have been so many. the truly stellar ones i remember, but the ones i enjoyed just as a way to pass the time, to travel through another place, another person--those i do not always remember. but they are in me still, every word of every book i have ever read, waiting for the right moment to pop into my mind, a random piece of phrasing, an out-of-the-way word, to say "here i am! remember me?" i have found myself quoting lines from books i barely remember having. i can remember entire pages of my very favorite books, and it's strangely comforting, much in the same way that i remember poems. when i was younger i counted that as one of my favorite skills, to be able to remember the written word (even things i was not particularly interested in remembering). i couldn't do it flawlessly, of course; i don't have that kind of memory. but i could remember how a page looked in my mind, and where the word or fact that i needed was located, the context in which it appeared. that's how i remembered "deluge" when heather and i argued over the pronunciation; it was in our little eighth grade vocab books, lower right hand corner of the page, and the example sentence was about the visitors to the exotic waterfall being drenched in a deluge as the water crashed onto the rocks. yeah i remember weird shit like that. i remember using the word "bombard" when i was in kindergarten, having learned it from my dad who would always tell us not to bombard him, and then having an older girl tell me authoritatively that that was most certainly not a real word (which i believed, for several years) in fifth grade stephanie salvatore and i had to write poems in mrs barber's class and i put something in about the smell of roses permeating the room, and no one knew what it meant, and she said she'd known it was mine. strange how so many of my memories involve things i wrote or read...i was telling sara last night about a time when i was ten or so, reading nancy drew in a restaurant, when they used the term "ejaculated" to describe how someone said something (it's an antiquated form of use, but it really does mean "to spit forth" lol) and i remember slyly asking my mother what that meant, only to have her exchange a horrified look with jen and grab the book away. what i want to know is, how the fuck did i know that ejaculated was a bad word when i was that young?! i distinctly remember that i asked my mom on purpose, knowing it would make her awkward, but i have no recollection of what i thought it really was or how i came to know that. i was a precocious reader back then; i always read jen's books, whether for school or from the library, because they were better than the ones we were reading. i came to understand the meaning of the verb "to fuck" thanks to mr. john grisham. maybe he mentioned ejaculation. i don't know.

i started planning out my next project today. i went out and bought a new black scrapbook, and started sorting out my two shoeboxes worth of spain and france stuff into little piles. contrary to what happened when i made my first scrapbook for greg, where i didn't actually fill the whole thing, i managed to already fil every page with what i've planned out, and i didn't even use up all the stuff from spain! i only made it as far as the beginning of the segovia stuff, which would make no sense to anyone but rae, but it's not even halfway. biarritz was halfway, i believe. no, i'm lying, my stuff from france is nowhere near the amount of stuff i saved from spain...i don't think i even wrote anythign down in france! i save almost everything...reciepts for money exchanges, international phone cards, business cards from tattoo parlors where certain friends got their belly buttons pierced, chocolates from a five star hotel....the silver welcome home ballooon that sara drew a face on and "pretend it's manuel"-- that,i haven't figured out how its going in.

since my mom knows nothing of the Great Manuel Adventure, i guess i'll show her the book with that page removed (she already expressed interest in seeing it). i left those pictures at school, i do believe. poo. i can't beleive i'm doing this three years after the fact, but better late than never!

(about an unnamed gentleman acquaintance)
James is a King: i know. he dresses as if he's taking viagra.

i seem to be starting off a lot of posts recently with "tonight was beautiful". well this is going to change right now, when i saw.............LAST NIGHT WAS BEAUTIFUL! :-)

it really was beautiful, tho. i think heather adequately captured the magic on her last post....especially some amusing quotes such as "you bitches better lock your doors or i'll cut you!", "THE CHICKEN IS SAFE!" and "michelle, why do I have to be the ball-looker?" that last comment was after we started discussing how the four of us (me, rae, sara and flanny) could be the four hobbits--tho only rae and h. flizzle fit the bill heightwise muaha--and we made rae frodo because she was absent and had no say and i fucking hate frodo. i'm sorry, had to say it at last, sam's the real hero in the movie, not mr. i-never-change-my-expression-EVER baggins! (plus i hate elijah wood. he has no jaw, just neck! yessssssssss i hate him). anyway, heather demanded to be sam because he's the cool one, and that left me and sara to be the ambiguously gay duo merry and pippin. sara immediately claimed the role of pippin--before she remembered which one pippin was, and i reminded her that he looks in the big ball, therefore she had chosen to be the ball-looker. and that makes me the cuter one! whoohoo!

LOTR came after several grueling mall hours, during which i bought myself some silver hoop earrings, new rings and a bracelet with a bow on it. i have a thing for bows, i realized! sara grumped and groused until i gave her one of the rings to wear lol. oh and we sold my scarf, a black and neon green one that i only wore for like two hours, to this little punk girl in the mall. let's see if she's honest and actually sends sara the rest of the money.

tonight was beautiful. i drove home from sara's, after dropping off rae and heather,wondering for the thousandth time how i came by these amazing friends in only four years (ok so seven for sara, i had a head start, whatever.) i loved all the things they gave me, not just because they were things (but ok the model of the 1969 red corvette rae gave me was HOT!!!) but because they know me so well, they know the things that would make me happy, and that in itself just brings a smile to my face. rae made boxes for me and sara; mine was laquered over with pictures of our trip to spain and france, even little metro tickets (i saved all mine too--one day there WILL be a scrapbook) and inside was the car and caramels because she knows i love them above all other sweets. heather gave me a plush hedwig doll (to go with the thousands of stuffed animals circulating the michelle/wendy domain), a simpsons poster which i just put up in my room, and a plug in potpourri thing that she made for each of us. sara gave me a companion lobster for linus (still to be named), the pablo neruda book which i shall begin tonight, and a bobble head devil duckie!!!

i hope you guys liked what i made/gave you...heather did indeed go wild for the hot air balloon lol. sadly, though the poem i framed for her did make sara cry, and she loved the weird llama furry thing, nothing can replace the lure of the lost pirate flag. one day, sara, one day! all my love goes with those gifts. nothing i buy/make/write can ever tell you how much you guys mean to me, more than i have already expressed to you in words, but i'll say it again: i love you so much.

oh yeah and in ac's we played the "never ever have i ever" game and i WON! (or lost, depending on how you're looking at it cough cough). that was amusing, especially since we made absolutely no attempt to lower our voices or use euphemisms. "never ever have i ever gone down on him in a theater...." lol

tomorrow it is off to boston, to relatives, to another evening spent just slightly tipsy. maybe jj, the semi-attractive kid who goes to the coast guard academy and who is NOT related to me will be there. still a bad memory of my sophomore cousin sara offering to "so hook you up with him". ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. anyway if i like you and you have a cell i'll be texting you a christmas message tomorrow.....i suppose i can call meredith....lol. i hope everyone has a very merry christmas, and rae whatever happens know that i love you, aj loves you, heather and sara love you, we're all one big fucking happy family unto ourselves so who needs another one? i mean really! :-)

tonight was a shitloaf of fun. yes i wrote SHITLOAF, it was originally shitload but i typed wrong and you know what i think it's better off that way. tonight was the gift exchange at khara's. mel cried when she read the little book i made for her, then laughed at the other stuff- an inflatable palm tree complete with coconut (since wendy's went over so well), stars, edible underwear flavored pina colada with rum, and a hot pink, strawberry flavored vibrator! lol. yes, going this morning to VIP by myself was sooooo sketchy. i mean it was a monday morning, but there were still only men in there besides the girl cashiers, and these were big burly middle aged men who all looked a tad embarassed to see me, like i was a reminder that their teenage kids are probably looking at the same stuff. when it came time to select an item for melissa, i was SO stumped. there were HUNDREDS of them, literally, all with cheesy names and naked chicks and various sizes, shapes, and flavors. yes, flavors. i even called khara for guidance, who found it so amusing i went in alone. i finally got one and left, picking up the underwear on the way out and feeling entirely too pleased that i was never carded. yay i look 18.

all the gifts were good. jessi gave me a hot topic gift cert and a LEGOLAS PIN WHICH IS ON MY CHEST!!! jessi recieved a bonzai tree with fiber optic lights from jess. emily gave jess some dvds and the free toothbrush she got from her dentist this morning. heather gave khara butt shorts and vicky's stuff, and heather got a bra/panty set from vicky's from mel, which she wanted to model. we made jesse (another one, this one male and khara's little bro who knows far too much about our scandalous lives) close his eyes and she came out in only her bra and with the undies on over her pants, and we were taking photos. then, true to the peerless comedy of our lives, KHARA'S DAD CAME HOME. it was so fucking hysterical! heather's face was priceless; first she dove toward us on the couch, then threw herself bodily into the bathroom just as he looked up. we were all practically peeing ourselves with laughter and he had no idea why, but he must be used to that by now!

later we went to the donut shop and this kid kyle who said he was a stripped in new york sat down with us, but his cuter friends didnt, they sat elsewhere. he was a tad sketchy i must say, and unsulted heather's drinking, and she was like "oh no a stripper from jersey did not just look down on me!" then who meanders in but sara lugo (s. lo from the block!) and steve "follow your nose" eberle. heather made him hug her, knowing full well he hates her guts. not like she gives a shit. then we returned to the hoyer home, saw mama hoyer who told us her amusing story about how she accidentally told mike craig's brother jiimmy that "anything is a step up from mike" (she didnt know he was his brother lol OR that mike and jess were back together).

other amusing anecdotes:
*discussing how an anonymous individual received some manual lovin' in a club bathroom* melissa: (confused), wait, so WHERE did she get fingered?"
jess: THE VAGINA!
the story of doctor flanagan giggling in church when the word "Ass" was mentioned in a song. discussing this tale later: jess: "so did they say ass like donkey, or ass like back that ass up?"
heather: (sings soprano) "jesus christ, baaaaaack that assssss uuuuuuuup! just like that!"
jess: "really?"

deconti taking an aerial picture of all seven of us with our hands on each other's boobs. random someone: "put your hand on my boobs!"
me: "khara has a free one!"
khara: "i have TWO free ones! "
deconti: "everyone look at me, look at me, YESSSSS!"

there were more but i can't remember them. poopies.

I haven't posted since I left school. Home is home, I already hate being around my sister. After last year's fiasco with the tree (my mom breaking down in tears in the line for the cashier as we're about to buy a fake tree) my mom waited until yesterday to buy a real tree, then decided it was too much of a hassle (don't know where she got THAT idea, since i'm the one always sweating and cursing putting it up) and sent me off today to find a fake one. sadly i couldn't find one that came with pre-attached lights like sara's, but i got it, it's sitting in a box upstairs waiting for me to assemble it. whoot.

tonight is gift exchange for the windsor/wh crowd. after a last minute deliberation over whether to buy melissa the gift jessi had suggested, i went with it, and BOY was that sketchy! can't post on that till tomorrow tho, just in case. i ran all over trying to find this calendar for my mom, which i couldn't find in the end, so i decided to make one of those fleecey blankets that sara had with her last night, you take two huge pieces of fleece and cut fringes all around and tie them together. it's black on one side and has this really bright blue on the other side with a bingo pattern (don't ask). i hope she likes it, it's so soft i'll take it if she doesnt!

speaking of sketch, the michelle/old man pattern continues! i stopped at a little gas station to use the atm, and the old man at the counter said "watch where you stand, you might just be under the mistletoe!" and gave me a truly awful wink. bleh. i fled quickly.

the past few nights have been great, though....i saw lord of the rings, which was FUCKING AWESOME, i must say. i love aragorn, love him love him love him!! then sara and i hung out, made sugar cookies and watched return of the jedi saturday night. it was so wonderful to be back with her, to be with rae and meghan, to be home with the people i missed so much. i loved last night too, when we (me, sara, heather, khara and emily) visited melissa at cvs and made dip and didn't watch any of the princess bride as we discussed sluttiness and people's sex stories and i don't remember what else. brought back so many summer memories. khara's dyeing her hair black, so now she and jessi will have really dark hair and ill look like a brunette! argh.

now i must go put together that tree before i head to khara's. tomorrow night is gift exchange for me and sara and heather and rae, and i'm super excited for that! i'm so proud of the gifts i made for them, so much more than the gifts i bought. but i'm still broke.

this is the last time blogging from school for the semester. actually im on wendy's comp because mine is already packed, and my wonderful roomie is behind me braiding my hair. just like when rae inflicted unimaginable torment on me during the HILL trip! love you rae.....goodybe room, goodbye moon, goodbye spoon.....poo. sniffle!

Last night was a lot of things. Painful. Uncomfortable. Sad. I finally told greg the truth about the night at melissa's house, where he thought i was drunk and i wasn't. i don't necessarily lie to be cruel; often i lie because i don't know how to explain the truth. i didn't know how to tell him i was scared of seeing him, so i had them tell him i was drunk instead, and that opened up a world of trouble. so that's settled.

i've made so many mistakes in my life. this is what i lay awake last night thinking about, until i forced myself to think of happier things...i never saw the complications coming, i always thought i kept my life simple, free of the shit that other people usually had. i started thinking, well it was less complicated last year. no, no it wasn't, there was stuff with sara and me being frustrated with greg and problems with my mom and jen. well it was less complicated junior year. no, there was the annie thing, and then the sara/greg thing. well it was less complicated before then, after my dad died. HA. no way. his death might have solved some things for this family but it sure as hell created another set of difficulties. well then it must have been less complicated before he died, right? wrong again. i remember how miserable i was a lot of the time, how i didn't like myself at all, how i constantly felt like the friends i hung around with (besides sara) , katherine, erika, pam, weren't really my friends.

so what was my conclusion? my life has never been simple, i've just been deluding myself. the complications sneak up on me. of course, some of them i've dealt myself, like getting involved with jackie, getting involved with andrew, etc. i always told myself i wouldnt be one of those girl with the soap opera lives. well, first i got involved with a guy one of my closest friends used to like, and then i broke up with him and rebounded toward another guy that one of my new friends liked at the same time, then i realized my mistake and cut that off, only to wind up with a new mess, and then was later briefly intrigued by the ex-boyfriend of an old acquaintance. thank lord above nothing happened there or i'd be in a worse mess, probably. but still, jesus! this from the girl who thought her intelligence would protect her from the sticky situations other mortals found themselves in. HA. big fucking good being smart did me.

why can't i look forward and perceive the complications before they happen? why can't i avoid some of this messiness? i never wanted a messy life. i'm a messy person usually but i thought i could keep my life in order. maybe not. why, why, why.

i have spent a while rereadin posts from many days past. like, last year. good things, bad things, sadness, nostalgia. insane. i had to re-post some snippets: "Mine and Greg's (grammar?) is two months from tomorrow. We'll just be getting back from the Southwest. I'm excited for both! Even when the fun of the trip is ending, I'll still have him to look forward to. And it becomes more and more apparent to me with each passing day how lucky I was to find a Greg. I can never figure out if it was fate or luck. At various times, in various moods, when I'm thinking about it and marveling at the fact that it happened at all, I lean toward one or the other. I'm in a warm mood tonight. Tonight it was Fate. "
that one made me kind of sad, kind of bittersweet. it made me wish i could go back there, not because i want to change how things turned out, really, because it's better this way, but just to enjoy that time a little longer.

"Another person's blog has gotten me thinking. It's possible to want opposite things at the same time because people are not homogeneous on the inside. Inside, we are strange amalgamations of completely disparate tendencies and desires. We are multifaceted, like the brightest of jewels, and it stands to reason that at different times, different aspects of ourselves will catch the light and make themselves known. Every part has its secret wish. Some parts of me wish that certain things could stay exactly the way they are, forever....and other parts wish i had my own separate universe, where things would be the way i made them, and i could carry out all those secret wishes without consequence. "

"When I opened the front door tonight and looked out onto the snow that is possible several feet deep on my lawn, I was struck by how similar it all seemed to the rolling sand dunes of the Sahara. The same little peaks and shadowed valleys, the same constant blowing and shifting....just all in silver-white. Beautiful. And then I went out there and blew it all to pieces.
Does this say something about humanity? It seems that we can never appreciate anything without destroying some part of it. We love flowers, and we pick them. We admire the fierce wild beasts, and we catch and cage them. We are awed by the vastness of the world and we set out to explore it, spreading conquest and disease.

Who hasn't felt it, though? That feeling you get sometimes when you come upon something completely pure, pristine; that dirty dangerous feeling, that overwhelming urge to just fuck it all up. Maybe we just can't handle things being perfect. Roald Dahl--great author--expressed this in the book Henry Sugar and Other Stories. He wrote one very short tale about the last really Good Child the world had ever seen. He was courteous, he was respectful, he was neat, he was quiet. And he was murdered by all the other children in the world who were tired of him making them look bad. So it goes."

those two i just liked. i love coming back to things ive written and not being able to remember what it was about, so excellently did i conceal my meaning.

sara made a site with pretty pictures!! sadly im not in like any of the ones from prom, but that's ok, i look cute in the one from columbus day! i loved that little dog! he was so nervouse! sara's photo gallery

home at last. not free, not till friday with this art history exam over my head which i should really be studying for RIGHT NOW, but still good. i'm unpacked, i've established christmas central on the dining room table, i put away all my clothes, cleaned my kitchen and bathroom because my mom never does, went grocery shopping, to dinner, and am now peacefully ensconced in the den. my mom and i had many an excellent conversation on the way home and at dinner, about a lot of things. nothing earth shattering, but at times like this i always feel closer to her. it's strange that for someone that most people find funny i don't really make my mom laugh very often. jen pretty much does that. i guess i'm more the one she has clear conversations with, and im ok with that. then again i don't think i annoy my mom after she's around me a while, and she always says she can't take jen for long periods of time. i suggested she go back to ireland for vacation, and maybe take jen because jen's already been andl iked it, and i have no desire to go, but she was like "umm....i don't think i can handle your sister for that long..." lol.

i was thankful more than ever to be escaping the drama today. an unnamed someone tacked up a "best/worst places to hook up" article from the Mirror on Amanda Piel's door, and who did they think did it? yours truly. if i may channel heather for a moment: girl, please. do they think i give a flying fuck what they're doing? not really, in fact i'd rather keep the thought out of my head and fill it with more attractive images like pablo and tfb. the unnamed someone only did it to poke fun at them anyway. i guess some people haven't learned the dangers of dormcest, but oh well.