saturday, november 30

My parents have no food in the house. Literally. There is a box of bran flakes in the cabinet, organic soy milk in the refrigerator, some of those fat free Kraft cheese slices (individually wrapped for your convenience) and three old eggs. Having senior citizens for parents is a fantastic experience in gastronomical courage. My mom also consumed an entire half a pumpkin pie in one sitting, and then screamed at me when I asked if there was any left. "GROW UP!" she bellows, "if YOU want pie, YOU get to it first!"

Whatever mom. NYC, here I come. Thank god. [8:53 PM]

friday, november 29

Well, I tried out my (er, his) new toy tonight at Matinee - apparently it's been renamed The Picture Show which I think makes it sound more skeazy than it already is - before the battery ran out after about 3 minutes. It's a little flaky with charging, but I've been messing with it and it should be fine. But, nevertheless, I at least have 3 minutes of exciting Matinee/The Picture Show footage. I'm almost sad to ship it up to Luke tomorrow. It's become...very near and dear to me. Oh well, parting is such sweet sorrow... [11:34 PM]

Hurrah, Luke's camera arrived today. I still have to ship it up to him, but that should be a minor inconvenience. I also bought another form of benzocaine which should hopefully stay in place and not drip onto my tongue. Numb tongue is not fun.

Naked people in Santa hats standing in Abercrombie = disturbing.

And now I am off to revel in the madness that is Matinee. If you don't know what Matinee is, you're better off remaining ignorant. [6:48 PM]

thursday, november 28

Happy Turkey day everyone. I'm off to feel bloated and sleepy. [7:27 PM]

wednesday, november 27

OMFG.

I had a cut on the inside of my mouth that got really sore and uncomfortable, so I bought some of that Anbesol local anaesthetic stuff and put it on the thing and now my entire tongue is numb.

Ohmigod. Ohmigod. I'm drooling all over the place. This cannot be right. [7:54 PM]

Well, I'm here. And no, I didn't feel like updating this thing last night, as I was too tired. And too cold. My parents apparently don't believe in heating the house. I am sitting at my computer on top of a large blue ball which was apparently intended for my mother to exercise with but has now been stored here. It's actually quite comfortable. I had a rather frightening encounter with a sniffer dog at Penn Station (luckily he was a bomb sniffing dog and not a drug sniffing one) but other than that things were rather uneventful. Now if you'll excuse me, I will go bounce inanely on this ball for the next hour. [2:26 PM]

tuesday, november 26

Alright boys and girls, I've managed to finish a 4-page paper on a book I've never read, and thus I'm off to Penn Station to catch what will hopefully be a relatively-uncrowded train to Pennsylvania. I should arrive (sane and still possessing all my limbs, with any luck) sometime later tonight at which time I may or may not post the exciting, scintillating details of my journey. Until then, au revoir... [1:47 PM]

monday, november 25

Luke wrote a poem. It's about 15 pages long. Most of it you would find incomprehensible, albeit brilliant and beautiful and tragic. But he wrote these two lines, and I need the world to read them, to understand them. Because this is the way it is.

"I cannot hope but to enliven the last embers of a day's fading by the songs to remember your face and your heart. I hope of the days when to be apart from you is as impossible as unwanted." [8:14 PM]

I'm leaving sometime tomorrow for Pennsylvania, thus I must hurry my ass up and finish this paper on Kurt Vonnegut before then. I also must pack. I may or may not be meeting up with Ye Olde Village Dealer (i.e. the high school kid that can't tell his pills apart) who has lately been trying to sell me either T3s - they make me itch, no fucking thank you - or shrooms. Acid, maybe, shrooms, nuh-uh. I know it's probably bad for me to be seeking drugs this actively, but what else am I going to do in Pennsylvania? Anyway, Sam (if you're reading this Sam, bless your heart) said I was "guaranteed something" if I met up with him at 30th Street station in Philly, so perhaps that endeavor will yield something tasty. Yeah, I know, I sound incoherent. Blame my hunger pangs.

This girl kept trying to strike up a conversation with me in Faye's Cafe while we were waiting in the endless line for sandwiches. I don't really have a problem with random people who try to talk to you. But this girl, I dunno. I wanted to smack her and tell her to shut the hell up. "Hell-ooooo!" she kept crowing, "can we get another person at the SANDWICH STATION??" as if I was going to pipe up and go "Yeah girl you tell em!" Luckily she turned around and preyed on these two unsuspecting girls behind me, so I was spared. But I was privileged enough to overhear her describing the various and prestigious Tisch theater programs in which she was currently enrolled. Well isn't that just spay-shul.

I finished my last piece of fiction for my writing class. Definitely not what I had envisioned it to be, but at least it's got that ultra-snazzy über-existentialist bit of dialogue at the end, perhaps the best piece of writing I've ever done. "Twenty million people don't give a shit about me / That's true / No one gives a shit about me / I give a shit about you / Why? / I'm your brother / Can you help that? / No, but I'm your brother. I have to give a shit about you..." Yeah, doesn't sound great out of context.

On the last page of my last story this one girl, Elina, wrote as her commentary "You are an absolutely amazing writer. I don't even know what to say." Didn't that just melt my heart. I wish it was true, but at least I can delude myself into believing it some days. [3:10 PM]

May it be an evening star
Shines down upon you
May it be when darkness falls
Your heart will be true
You walk a lonely road
Oh! How far you are from home

Mornie utúlie (darknesss has come)
Believe and you will find your way
Mornie alantie (darknesss has fallen)
A promise lives within you now

May it be the shadows call
Will fly away
May it be your journey on
To light the day
When the night is overcome
You may rise to find the sun

Mornie utúlie
Believe and you will find your way
Mornie alantie
A promise lives within you now
A promise lives within you now [12:00 AM]

sunday, november 24

I'm sitting here (Luke has gone to bed, bless him) listening to "Mountain" by Tonic - those dubious purveyors of Appalachian/Celtic rootsy type rock - and reading a story I wrote in 9th grade. I remember that winter; it was the Olympics, and construction men had ransacked our bathroom. I had to walk across gaping floorboards to get to the bathtub. And there was no shower. So I sat in the bathtub for hours, staring at the stripped walls, wood and caulking, and let my thoughts just come. My freshman year in high school was the last year I was really happy. Or not happy I should say, but innocent. Fuck, that's not the right word either. The last year before I really knew what sorrow was, what it was to hate yourself, what it was to want to rip your heart out for the pain it caused. I was still a little kid, I wandered around in jean overalls and wrote stories about futuristic worlds and characters who exploded into psychic flame. I wanted to be a writer. I loved Ireland. I was very Irish. I was very passionate. Very young and silly and passionate. And I wrote this story I'm reading now. It was called "Some Kind Of Fire" and it's brilliant, the language is brilliant...still about the level on which I write now, and I was only 15. It was too good for a 15-year-old. Too full of explosions and flame and pain. I guess I saw it coming. I remember sitting at the computer, curled up in my silly smiley-face socks with the Olympics on television, listening to this song and writing that story. I was consumed with it for days, weeks. It went on and on. I had no one in my life then, no one like Luke or anyone like that, and yet I was still so full of energy, full to bursting. It was the last time I really felt that, that sense of energy that was only positive and not negative, with no real agony in my life, no tragedies, nothing to really indicate to me that the world was as cold and dark as it really was.

And so now there has been another winter Olympics since then, and I am half a decade older, and I would almost wish to go back. To leave this love I have, this devotion, the things I've learned. Things were just so guileless back then, so unthreatening. I thought I could write my way out of any predicament. Things were good then, easy. And even though obviously there is no going back, I am cheered and comforted, by the fact that its story has survived. [8:06 PM]

I know that we go through things day by day, and we take these little baby steps, just like we always have, little baby steps towards the future. But tonight, I wish I could hold his head in my lap and run my hands over his scruff of hair and have him fall asleep in my arms. Because I see him like this and it just makes me wish I could take all the pain inside him and take it into me and I wouldn't even care. I wouldn't think twice. [7:17 PM]

In case you're interested, my spring semester schedule is as follows:

[V54.0010] Media In America
[V54.0021] Reporting I
[V95.0030] Advanced Spanish Review
[V22.0002] Intro To Computer Programming

Yes, I have decided tentatively to pursue a Computer Applications minor as well as my Psych minor (so do the two added together make a major?) although I'm a little dubious about one of the courses I would have to take. The first homework assignment was to write a paragraph in MS Word, put one of the sentences in italics, print it out and hand it in. Well, at least it'd be an easy A...

Oh, and of course I'll have to get up at 7am Monday through Thursday. Don't scoff; that is the end of the world. [4:26 PM]

I love it when I'm awakened by the sound of my roommate babbling away on the phone in Hindi. I love it when she interrupts my work to "check something on my computer" (yes I know Acrobat doesn't work with Windows 95 - which is why you should get a new fucking computer). I love it when she turns the light off and goes to bed at 11pm on a Saturday night. Well fuck her if she thinks I'm going to put SNL on mute. God help me when her family moves back to India and she's around here 7 days a week. I will not be responsible for my actions. So much for privacy... [3:58 PM]