For the first time, last night, I did something musically creative. Well, maybe that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but my musical creativity is usually limited to adding harmonies to songs I could (and probably do) sing in my sleep.

But no, last night I helped Peter write a song...or so he says, anyway. "Ok, I'm going to sing this part here, and you sing at the same time but start on this note over here. Then you add whatever notes you think sound right." Apparently, despite my inability to hold a pitch in my head for more than a minute or two, I managed to be of use. I was also able to apply some of my meager poetic skills in the lyric-editing department and convinced him to remove a wildly out of place polysyllabic interlude at the end of a verse. Wohoo.

Being a multi-medial artist is really fabulous.

Somewhere in my wild, dark fantasies that capture a minor chord and and hold it in my consciousness, I imagine death.

Occasionally, I see possibilities surrounding my own death, never peaceful and quiet at a late age, always violent and moving. I always die with defiance in my eyes. A righteous fury that promises to haunt my killers.
More often, though, I see the death of someone close to me. My mother, Kat, Peter...someone that will affect the way I live my life. Today, I was listening to "Jackie's Strength" and heard a siren on the streets. What would I do without him? I pictured myself running down to the street and holding him in my arms as red flashing lights surrounded us. Telling him that I loved him and that I was sorry that I could never possibly give him everything he deserved.

I just heard that the boyfriend of a girl I used to know had been killed. They'd been living together for two years and were all but engaged, by most counts. Sieze the day.

So, for the first time ever, I'm totally uninspired to do my astronomy homework. An essay on cosmology, I plan to discuss the plausibility of the big bang theory. I'd much rather dance around to Choirgirl. Or do anything else, really. Which is a damn shame, considering how much I love this class. If only it weren't due tomorrow.

Yeah for getting decently-paying jobs in air conditioned offices with people who just think you're awesome! It'll be just like last summer only with less girl-talk! Oh right, and regular hours. :) and my own apartment. With parties! Wohoo!

And there I thought caffeine would make my headache better.

Big swallow...Lime Tostito.

Big swallow...lime tostito.

Big swallow...lime tostito...lime tostito...lime tostito...

Big swallow.


Drinking my troubles away...or at least into submission.

Mmm...vanilla coke. ;)

I'm beginning to think it was a very very bad decision to stay in Philadelphia this summer.

Ok, weird dream time.

It started out, best as I can recall, in a big gym. The entire membership of my high school marching band was there, and we were testing a trio of hybrid indoor sports. The only one I remember now was some cross between basketball and soccer, but it was called Herschel. My watch, which started working dubiously yesterday while out shopping, was again malfunctioning in my dream, but I had crafted a large wall-clock in honor of the event. It went unappreciated and was still in its box on the floor by the end of the games. Kat, who was apparently in the 'marching band' told me that she knew where I could get a new watch the next day. Not that it was really a place to shop, but nonetheless...Where was this place, I asked. Disney world! Yes, the band was going to Disney world the next day, and I had forgotten. Ah, well yes, I could even get a new Tinkerbell watch if I wanted.

It was very late and my mom was driving us home, my sister, myself, and my mom, in her minivan, and it was raining. When we got home, home was some sort of condominium college dorm-like thing. We had to press a button at the gate for security to open it, and once inside the complex, they had to check our cards to let us in. Then there were keys to the doors. When I first came through the gate, I forgot to close it behind me, but returned to do so. Inside, my sister and I packed frantically while my mom fretted that my dad would find us and do I-don't-know-what. It was like a bad made-for-tv movie. My sister and I attempted to lock the patio door, with little success, but tried for an interminable length of time. I could spend a long time describing the locking mechanism, but I won't.

Anyway, while we did this, people walked past the door. Some people visibly were undergoing some sort of strange mutation, usually involving the color of their skin being something like purple or green while others of the people were normal and unthreatening and speaking to us through the door and who we tried to protect from seeing the mutating people. At some point, we saw my dad walk through the complex only he was turning green and covered with bright orange bumps. We would find out later that he was morphing into a strange conglomeration of vegetables, including carrots and cabbage. He passed us by, apparently without seeing us, and we turned away fromt he door to tell our mom. When we turned back, the locking mechanism on the door was different and we were able to lock it securely.

We had closed the curtains on the patio door and the nearby windows so that people could not see in, but as soon as the door had been locked, we saw a figure outside the door and window. They were obviously trying to see us, and we moved to avoid them, but there was no way to hide. Then the figure disappeared from the window, and we heard strange sounds...a moment later, it appeared at the window again, only taller, and proceeded to open the window and climb in. Yes, we'd apparently locked the door, but not the windows. The person that climbed through the window appeared un-mutated but was my sister's elementary school violin teacher who was, for the purposes of this dream, my dad's sister. Oh, and she was on stilts.

She took the stilts off and walked past us to open the front door while we stood in shock. My dad entered, apparently also un-mutated, this time, and conveyed somehow that we were to prepare for a trip. My sister and I had already been packing, but we would need groceries. I used the house phone to call 911 when he wasn't looking, but the voice on the other end of the line was his. I made an excuse and then hung up, wondering if he had just redirected our house phones to his cell phone. When I tried to use my cell phone, it had been reprogrammed or reformatted so that I would have had to go through a lot of setup procedure in order to use it.

At some point the house changed to the house I lived in for 9 years...the phone was in the same place and the outside became the same. When we left the house, we saw a pile of giant leaves and vegetables: the shed skin of my mutated father.

My mom and my sister and I went shopping to a WalMart or something similar, but I don't know what we were really looking for. We were in a panic. I tried to call 911 from my cell phone which was working at the time, but my dad answered again, so I disguised my voice and hung up. He had hacked into the 911 system. In the store, we bumped into Kat, who suddenly had bangs and long black hair pulled into a low ponytail. We chatted idly about our upcoming trip to Florida, and she asked if I liked her new hair, and I asked how she'd suddenly grown it so long. She indicated that it was a wig, but noted that "Indigo Kat" was also a lot slimmer than normal Kat...like an action figure or something.

I remembered the number for the police station and called in on my cell phone. The man who picked up was sleepy, and told me that because of the late hour, no one could help me. I begged him profusely citing the fact that we were likely to be murdered and that my father was the one who had hacked into the 911 system, but he was still hesitant. My dad came around the corner in the store, and I had to stop talking to the police. Tried to think of other numbers to call, but couldn't...

That's the last thing I remember before waking to bright sunlight sometime around 8am smiling and reminded of Peter.

Even though we didn't have class today, for those interested, I'm posting another 'Best of Survey of the Universe'

--"It's more like 12 billion years than 10, but who's counting."

--"I'm tired of people talkin' smack about the sun...the sun is not an 'average' star, it's above average!"

--Kat: "I don't get the metaphor. What's the spaceship?" Prof. Goldberg: "The spaceship is your inner child."

--Imagine an imaginary mass manager imagining managing and imaginary mass.

--Mercury makes a spirograph!

--Newton: "Gravity doesn't affect photons at all!"
Einstein: "No, it does."

--"I don't notice that I've crossed this line, but I do notice that I'm about to be destroyed."

--Spaghettification. Yeah. Just spaghettification.

--"Imagine the galaxy as a translucent pancake...and you're in the middle. You look left, you look right, what do you see? Pancake. You look up, you look down? No pancake!"

--"And that question may not even make sense, grandma, cause the universe may be infinite! Pass the yams."

--"The Great Debate" ...no, not boxers vs. briefs.

Enjoy!

There was a lot of broccoli at dinner, last night. Not surprisingly.

The world changes so slowly, sometimes, that we don't even notice it. A girl in my photography classes that I'd never liked has somehow become a friend.

Sometime in the past few weeks, when I wasn't looking, I got stressed and crazy...cold and impossible to please. I never saw it coming, or even noticed a change within my own mind. The only way I knew was through how I saw myself acting. I want things to be as they were before, but I don't know if that's possible or even a good idea.

Things change so quickly.

I was in the caf today after my third grilling by the weirdos at the Drexel Nutrition center, trying to decide what I could eat without feeling guilty when I passed the asian cuisine station. Rice noodles...mmmm. Weird stuff on the rice noodles....bah. But as I walked away, I got a glimpse of what they were preparing, presumably for dinner. The chinese chef in his white jacket and red chef's hat held one long spoon or fork or spatula in each hand and was vigorously tossing the contents of a three-foot-wide wok.

Yes, a huge vat of broccoli. Easily twenty pounds of beautifully green, steaming broccoli.

Why is this so amusing to me?

He is so beautiful when he laughs.

I attribute my recently erratic behavior to one of the following: chemical imbalance or subconscious refusal to be happy.

As far as a chemical imbalance goes, I've been eating very well lately, which is entirely likely to send my entire body into shock. Haven't had ice cream in quite some time, nor pizza or anything fried, that I can think of. I avoid the cafeteria french fries as a matter of priciple, though the grilled cheese does still get me, once in a while. I'm trying to compensate for whatever is wrong with me by imbibing very large quantities of Coca-cola Classic. All caffeine, all the time.

The second issue is far more complicated, and involves me sabotaging my relationships. "You say 'You're crazy, why do you keep doing this? Everything is fine.' And I think 'I'm crazy, I do this all the time,' until I start to think that something's really wrong." Lisa, you know what I mean.

How does my life revolve around music?

And here I'm tempted to include Kepler's laws. I am such a loser.

Thanksgivings were always the worst. I mean sure, competition was over and we still had to march the show, but half the band would always be missing, it was a day off from school, and we who were left would always be stuck in the absolute freezing cold in our stupid-looking uniforms. And our parents always forced us to go. Could it get worse than that? Of course it could. The clarinet section had to sit in front of the percussion, unfailingly. So, we're talking silly outfit, watching a football game just dumb with tradition, headache from drummers, missing friends, and above all else, cold. No matter how many layers we put on under our uniforms, there was no way to escape it. A cup noodles or hot chocolate during third quarter could do little, if anything, to combat the chill that we eventually had to just let flow through us and leave us shaking in its wake.

I was awakened sharply by the single PA beep that precedes a fire alarm. Jerked from sleep, I sensed the awful fate that would be delivered to us only a second later "There has been an emergency reported. Please walk, don't run, to the nearest exit and exit the building." Kat groans from her side of the room. I spring into action. Glasses, long pants over shorts, sweatshirt, flip-flops. "C'mon, Peter." He grabs jeans, belt, socks, bandanna, and puts on shoes. We know it will be very cold. We all stumble down six flights of stairs, I in my space-bending glasses and a daze. Was feeling very silly. Discovered that it was 3:30 in the morning. No good at all. Outside, we consider sitting in my car, parked directly in front of the dorm, but decide that we might get in trouble for being so close to the building.
Opt for huddling against the cold with everyone else. Shiver...with everyone else. Discover that there was smoke in our lounge. Discuss murdering the boys. Shiver some more. Wrap zippy sweatshirt around Peter's bare arms, pulling him close. Repeat.

Half awoke many times this morning. Peter thanks me for tolerating him and his violent dreams, repeated repositioning for better snuggling. Dreamed of snow in July. Woke again to Peter asking if he could turn on the air conditioner. *sigh* Yes, alright. He turns it on, gets back into bed. "I, on the other hand, am cold," I say to him. I'd warned him the night before that if I got cold, he'd have to keep me warm. No answer. *sigh* Roll over, wish for sweatshirts, give up, get out of bed, apply sweatshirt and slipper socks, blog.

I've grown far too accustomed to eating breakfast alone, lately.

I love you.

I stared at the monitor. It was a struggle every moment to keep my eyelids open, but I shuffled files back and forth, searched for songs, lyrics, chords...things I didn't have to be doing at all...My fingers slowed, my head drooped...

I felt warm, sticky breath on my neck. A low chuckle from my left. I jerked awake, upright, and my eyes darted wildly, searching the shadows of the room.
"Who's there?"
Sense, not sight alerts me to movement on my right, near my shoulder. I wheel on it...nothing. A sour breeze drives my mind to the brink of hysteria and a deep, soothing voice mocks "Oh, come, now. You know who I am. You've been avoiding me..."
Recognition sprawls across my consciousness.
He says, "Where have you been hiding, lately?"
"At Peter's house."
"It's been far too long, my dear..."
"I was busy," I say, though I know it's a poor excuse. He tsks me. I know..."You've caught me. Is it time?" He chuckles low in his throat...anticipation of his victory. A sigh of resignation passes my lips, but is it faintly flavored with gratitude?

I sit back down into my chair, lay my head on my folded arms, and shut my eyes. He softly kisses each of my eyelids...sleep is upon me.

Ok, I give up. I just can't come up with enough free verse to keep myself in blog entries. There's no way for me to convey, exactly, this sense that my life has taken on. The girl into whose room I am moving for the summer is leaving for California on Sunday. We love her, and we'll miss her, but she'll be back in a few months, which is good. I chatted with her roommate (my soon-to-be-roommate) last night, and we talked about having barbecues on the deck. About the climbing flowers that their next door neighbor has planted for the fence and about the parties that she wants to throw and to which I eagerly agreed.

I'm going to be working, I suppose, very hard, but since I don't know which job I'm going to end up with, it's a little hard for me to imagine what my summer will be like. All I really know is that I'm going to have a little room all to myself, keys to my own apartment, and the ability to throw parties for the few friends that will be close enough to Philadelphia to come, this summer.

Friday, I'm going to go over to the apartment (for the second time ever) and see what furniture will be left for me. I'll be getting keys...

I'd never realized until this year just how significant keys are.

Crushed,
Petals smell of apples, red and white,
Wet velvet.

Around them, sleeping body curled
Knees to chest.
Clothes of a "man,"
Face of innocence.

Have I still got it? Let me know what you think about my latest, pretty much unedited work.

This morning has been on pause. I don't know when I woke up, but when I did, it felt as if I'd been up for hours. Peter lay still next to me, but I turned to look at him and he turned to look at me. We kissed. Some amount of time was spent whispering about what we'd dreamed and what we wanted to do in the next few days. I had Jewel's "Morning Song" repeating gently in my head.

"Let the phone ring, let's go back to sleep."

The phone rang, and time was set back in motion.

I'll be going home this weekend for the second time since spring break. But I'm brining Peter home again, which was last done almost two months ago. We're so different now than we were then. We've been together almost three months, we know each other much better, we have picked up each others mannerisms. The last time I slept alone, it was April, and before that one night, I can't remember how long it was. I feel as if my world has never been so right.

On a side note, Mike Kovacs, the musical hero and guitar teacher of my entire hometown, not to mention the "Personal Obi Wan Kenobi" of my ex-boyfriend's band, would apparently like to see me after the show on Saturday. I'd say he either wants my sister's cookie recipe or he'd like me to help him with something art-related.

I'm hoping it isn't about the cookies.

Ok...so...it's done. I'm going to be living here in the city on my own power this summer. I have one job lined up for sure but that I haven't signed a contract for, yet and another one that I called about today. The lady on the phone said that all they looked for was students with nice telephone voices. Either way, I've crunched the numbers and I should definitely not starve to death. If I do well enough at either job, I should be able to save up all the money that I hope to, and...that'll just be spifftastic. I'm kind of a little in shock from the idea that I might never live at home again. I'm also worrying a little that I won't get to see my friends from home, this summer...but I have no doubt that it will all work out.

I'm looking forward to the idea of hard work with time limits. You know, I get to work hard all day, come home tired, but not have any homework to do. I can just sit around...hang out with my friends...do my laundry...not do my laundry. Whatever I want. I'll get to buy my own groceries...not to mention the fact that this will be a perfect middle step for me. Right now, I have only the one roommate, and we don't have to clean a bathroom or take out the garbage or pay bills. In the fall, I'll have five roommates, and we'll have to do all of those things together. For this summer, though, I'll have just one roommate but the responsibility that I'll have in the fall, or at least some facsimile thereof. A good in-between time. Three months, actually. A quarter of a year. A third of the time that I will have been at Drexel by the end of the term. Crazy.

I walked at a steady pace down Market Street, this morning, between 37th street and 36th street. I see a man in a dress shirt, dress pants, and a tie sprinting towards me, past me and wonder if his watch is slow.

I find myself in a very strange place tonight. I talked to my ex-boyfriend on the phone for the first time, really, in a couple months. We talked for almost two hours just about what's been going on in our lives...his trip to Ohio, my trip to Boston, his prolific drinking, my first couple of drinks. Our old poetry cronies: who still writes, who doesn't.

When I asked him how things are in general, he notes that things are much better now that he's seeing a therapist and since things with Sara have quieted down. "What happened with Sara?" I ask him. I'd met her when I'd been to visit him at school an eternity ago. I knew she was a very close friend of his...wondered if anything more had happened...?

No...she'd been "sexually assaulted" which I suppose is just their way of not saying that she was raped.
During a party in her dorm.
By a guy that they all knew.
Who videotaped it.

He's being expelled from school and probably being sent to prison for a long time, which is all great...but I still want to curl up safe in someone else's bed, tonight.

So, I have this dilemma. I have no idea what to do with myself this summer so I'm going to engage in some good, old-fashioned, thinking out loud.

Money: must make significant quantities of money for undisclosed reasons.
Ways to get money: working.
Ways to lose money before next fall: spending on random stuff, food, rent, gas.
Places to live: mom's house, Philadelphia.
Places to work: Campaign to Save the Environment, Karen's Designer Consignment Boutique, possibly others here in Philadelphia.

Reasons to stay here in Philadelphia: Peter, sense of independence and self-sufficiency, possibly make more money?
Reasons to go home: no rent, high school friends, job with fun people in air conditioning.

Conclusion: none yet. Must call about other jobs, and call Karen. ASAP.

I hate being a grown-up.

Walked home today...finally, after spending probably far too much time at Peter's this weekend. Tried to look 'urban' for my walk home. That is to say, I tried to look as if I would deck anyone that either came within two feet of me or looked at me funny.

Stopped a game of frisbee just by walking past...

Almost fell over when a homeless-looking man near the volleyball courts said to me, "You look very nice today, miss." I blinked at him for a moment, "...Thank you very much."
He then of course proceeded to tell me his story and ask me for money, but just his incredible politeness was shocking.

Discovered yet again that no matter how long I think I'm spending in the shower, it's never significantly more than fifteen minutes. I can shave my legs, wash my hair three times, it really doesn't matter.

Oh, and Peter was talking about his tonsils again last night in very graphic detail: still madly in love with him.

New best thing about sex: having the energy to rearrange furniture afterwards...

?

It seriously looks as if I'll be spending my summer wandering the streets of Pennsylvania and or New Jersey knocking on doors and trying to convince people to give me money. Yes...the cause is a good one, but I'm sure it won't hurt that I'm cute and young and hopeful-looking.

When I was probably no more than two or three years old, my mom left me to play by myself while she cooked dinner or something. A while later, when she had decided that I'd been too quiet for too long and had come looking for me, she found me in the bathroom with my father's razor. As she entered, I pulled my finger down the blades and looked in amazement at the bit of skin in the sink and the blood that began to well up in a tiny gem on my fingertip.

Years later, in the new house, I broke one of our MacDonald's Garfield mugs. They were thick clear glass with single-frame comics printed or painted on their outer surfaces, and much beloved by me and my sister. When I'd picked up the largest pieces, the base of the mug, it's handle and much of the sides stood in one chunk on the counter, backlit by the ceiling light. One broken edge sparkled and I wondered...how sharp could it possibly be? Pressed my finger into it. Yes, it was very sharp.

At lunch, freshman year, he would have a can of something to drink with his lunch. When he was done, he would twist the can in his hands until it began to rip...I told him to stop or that he'd cut himself. He wouldn't, of course, being the way he is, and the tearing of paper-thin metal and jagged edges would continue until the end of lunch. By then, I would either sit cringeing or pointedly averting my eyes. He did cut himself, once.

Senior year, five of us sat in Laura's basement eating pizza and pretending to work on a project for English class. The cheese had melted together as the pizza was delivered and we'd had to cut the slices apart with a knife which still lay in the empty box. He picked it up and started playing with it...cutting the box, paper, his fingernails, whatever. "Please stop it...you're going to hurt yourself or someone else, and it's pointless what you're doing," I said.
"No."
"Please..."
"No."
The others: "Dude, she asked you to stop..."
"Cut it out! It's really bothering her."

"No."

I resist razors and mostly-decorative blades. I'm told most pyromaniacs are fascinated by sharp objects.

Oh my god...people are so damned funny, lately. I was reading Glamour last night--"Rev that engine! Gun that motor! Tie that man buck naked to the rear bumper like a Wisconsin deer in hunting season!"

About sexual assertiveness, of course.

Also, Kat's latest and the comments on Martha's latest marginalia are hysterical.

I promise to write a real post sometime soon. :) Whenever I find a little presence of mind.

Many thanks to Martha and Kat for teaching me something new about html.