Three Thanksgiving meals and zero schoolwork later...

I find myself longing. Longing for peace...quiet...a way to spend my own time as I choose. Much like today, but without guilt or without deadlines hanging over me. I want to read, polish my nails, go to the museum, walk, and just be myself for a while. I want to bowl, to take yoga classes, to learn some new and useful craft. I want to clean all day, and then to bake and make a mess for myself. I want to shop for Christmas presents. I want to shop for me. I want to audition for the winter show and I want to get in.

I want to have time for everything.

He's like a filter, I've decided. At least when I want to go to sleep, he is. Having him warm and pressed against me just makes me forget about everything that isn't looming dreadfully over my head or that isn't entirely fleeting and trivial. What does that mean? It means I forget every worry that I can afford to forget until morning, which usually leaves no worries at all. Nothing to run circles in my head keeping me awake, nothing to keep me from relaxing every muscle in my body and from meditating on leaves. It's the feeling of comfort and, more importantly, safety. Safety from everything.

In your arms I am invincible.

"See?" she said, waving her left hand in front of someone's face.
"Are you really?"
"Yeah!"
"Congratulations!"

This weekend, I met some girls from somewhere out in the middle of Pennsylvania. One has diamonds and another has a silver ring just big enough to make any guy think twice. "They're like the Future Housewives of America. Birthin' hips and all," he said. Yes, I thought. They already talk as if they're someone's mom. But someone loves them an awful lot. Someone thinks that each of those girls is the most beautiful girl they ever need to lay eyes on. Someone was ready to announce that they were done roving and that it was time to settle down. Maybe their lives aren't perfect, just yet, but someone decided that one of those girls was the one person they wanted to build a future with.

I've never before heard of boys like those, and I'd like to know how to get one.

Doing my part to help out: the new EP from Lisa can be found in the merchnadise section. Available on preorder *only* and the deadline to order is Dec 6th. Rock on, boys and girls.

My apologies for leaving my archives to sit and rot for such a long time. Now they should actually be working on their own little page. Wohoo!

An old gaming buddy of mine directed me to his music at ampcast.com. It's some thoroughly passable trance music, if you go for that sort of thing, and apparently he's having some measure of success with it. While I was there, looking around, I did become pretty interested in the community there. Fans can sign up to use the boards, chat, share playlists and probably some other nifty features I haven't seen yet. Anyone can download or stream mp3s of the indie artists that have taken up residence there. Artists, musicians and others, can sign up, get their own web site, self-promote, distribute their mp3s, "manufacture and fulfill 'retail ready' CDs" at no upfront cost, as well as sell those cds and mp3s through ampcast and receive some form of royalties while keeping all the rights to their music. They host all genres of music including country, rap, classical and rock. For those of you music people out there, take a look. It might be a good deal...I wouldn't be the person to ask.

In my life:

love
glow time
flat-felled seams
punkin pie?
very negative critiques
making boys think of me...just think of me
soft soft soft hair
boys who attend 'beauty night'
feeding birds in the garden
not especially caring what Stuart thinks as long as I don't fail and have to take his class over again
holding a strong C in Stuart's class
six part vocal arrangements
actually arranging multi-part vocal arrangements
trying to convince people to stop reading Lolita and to pay attention to me
love

Winter seems to bring on a sleepiness--an inclination to stay nice and warm in bed, whether or not you have company. And that's why I skipped my classes yesterday. The cold, the snuggling and the daunting 25 minute walk back to campus. Which is why I never stay at Peter's apartment on school nights. I know I'll never make it to class. But it's always worth it. We got up and had breakfast about an hour and a half after my first class had started and then went right back to bed. Finally back home for my doctor's appointment (Drexel gives the pill for free, now. Cool, eh?) and choir. Remember on the way to choir that the boys acapella group, 8 to the Bar, has rehearsal. Panic ensues as I remember that I have no digital camera with which to continue my 8ttB picture story, but is then dismissed like the rest of the day. At choir he recorded a couple of our more awful renditions of lovely choral music then I sprint to the photo lab to get a camera. Two hours shooting the boys and being shamelessly flirted with. Home to find Peter asleep in my bed mumbling that he doesn't feel well.

That's what I get for taking a day off.

I could say any number of things about my father. The first thing I usually say in discussion about him with those who don't know him is 'Did you know that my father is the antichrist?' Now, that's a great conversation starter any day. Then usually comes the bit about him being the only 6 foot 1 inch tall 100% Chinese guy I know. Go figure, right.

So if I had to pick one person to be the source of all evil, I'd pick him nine days out of ten, and the simple reason is that he was the only part of the first fourteen or fifteen years of my life that consistenly made me unhappy. After that, he was trying really hard to make life impossible for my mother, which leads me to anger on her behalf and an awful lot of inconvenience in other ways. He worked a lot, and wasn't usually happy or interactive when he got home, and I was somehow made to mention this the only time I ever saw a psychiatrist. My parents suspected I had an attention disorder, so they took me in. Without knowing my tendency to burst into tears in any sort of confrontation with an authority figure, the gentleman asked me how I felt towards my parents. At which point I sobbingly explained that my dad wasn't home very much. Unfortunately, this was relayed to my parents, and my father decided to make more of an effort to be home.

He would yell, to say the least. And no one who didn't live with him could even imagine what we meant when we said he did. When my sister and I were little, he would lose his temper at us for things that were at best childish and at worst not our fault at all. He would threaten to hit us, not just with an open hand but with a belt or a hairbrush. And while spanking is one thing, I do think that the hairbrush in my drawer right now, old and beloved, was used to hit me and my sister at least once. Once when he was angry, he put a nail in the wall between my doorway and my sister's doorway and he hung his belt on it as a threat. He apparently needed to wear it sometime later and it came down, and there was just the empty nail left. A while after that, my sister hung a tree ornament off of it: a heart of iridescent blown glass.

When he decided to divorce my mother, he turned civil towards us. It was always my opinion that he was trying to win us over to his side because at some point they did make my sister and brother and I decide who we would want to live with when they split. He took us out to Broadway shows, bought us presents, planned vacations to sunny warm places. I tended to refuse the outings that would require me to be in his company. "No, dad, I don't really want tickets to RENT. No, thank you, I don't want to go to Disney World," because I felt that he was trying to bribe us into liking him. On the other hand, if he wanted to buy me things, that was fine with me. We all knew that since my dad was the breadwinner and since we'd probably end up living with my mom, presents would be few and far between. So instead of vacations, I got photo equipment. An enlarger in my basement...and probably some other things I can't remember. No promised car on the sixteenth birthday or on the seventeenth either, for that matter. But what can you do. To me, it was low and sneaky to try to trick us into liking him. Or maybe he was just trying to make up for all the years he made us miserable. I preferred interpreting it as the former, because I didn't have to think about forgiving him.

These days he's very nice. He visits me with his girlfriend, brings me food and cranberry juice and is otherwise quite a likeable person. He pays my rent without complaining or complication. But somehow it's not enough to make up for nearly two decades of being screwed with. I think he suspects it, too. No, of course I don't forgive him. But I have to feel...I don't know. Sorry for him? Because he's trying very hard, but he doesn't know what to do. He sent me a box. A care package, if you will. It had in it two of my favorite candy bar, fruit snacks that I like, crackers that I like, a snack-size pack of two cookies that I like, dryer sheets, a purple felt wizards' hat, and a letter. The contents alone were enough to make me and Kat crack up. When I opened the letter and read the first line, I threw it back into the box with a nervous laugh. Kat and Peter look at me as if I've grown another head or just picked up a dead rat or something of the sort. I hand it to Kat and tell her to read the first sentence. It reads "As I take pen in hand, from one perspective, I think 'How barbaric?!?' I can't remember when I last wrote a letter." Her reaction was much the same as mine. Peter, however, failed to get the humor. It goes on to describe how my brother is with both my sister and me gone away at college, but then he says how he misses me and that he should have been a better parent for me, and basically that he will try to do that in the future. Then there's more about how he's proud of me.

And they wondered why I was crying in the middle of the kitchen.

So, I admin or IMM on a MUD, as I've noted before. Lately, I've been reminded of just how much fun it is to hang around there and just shoot the breeze with the players, and why it was that I liked the play so much. From the staff's point of view, at least, there is always something new going on. Something being built, added, fixed, solved. This evolution is what has always appealed so much. In this recent renaissance of my own interest there, I've been introduced to a nascent clan concept. Turns out that some player has finally realized that what our game world needs is a group of people with a good real strong sense of religion. And, of course, something to believe in.

Like me. I have every confidence in myself that I can be quite a proper object of worship. And I've always wanted a rabid cult all my own. What more, really, could any girl ask for? A bunch of people who have never judged me by my bra size and who are willing to throw hours of work into the wind in order to win my divine favor.

We're also considering requiring all the members of the religion to bow down every hour on the hour, to face southwards and to call out some praise to me in my glory. This could do good things for my state of mind.

There once was a mystical grove shaded by huge and ancient trees. It was full of mist and the sun never reached it; it was lit diffusely through the thick canopy of leaves and through the thick fog. In this mystical grove lived many strange and wonderful creatures, including the naughty sprites of Monty Python and a couple of very naive unicorns.

One day the great North Wind grew bored with the obstinate mistiness and protectivivity of the grove and so he blew their little miasma away. The sun broke through the trees and struck the pretty white unicorns square on the flanks. The unicorns, being white, promptly proceeded to reflect every wave of visible light into the eyes of every other creature, real or imagined, in the mystical grove. Now, if one wanted to take a properly exposed photograph of this scene, I would recommend either placing a grey card in front of the unicorns, filling your frame with it, and reading off of it *or* you could take a meter reading off of the brightly lit flanks of the unicorns and expose about two stops over that.

And the moral of the story is: always carry a grey card when photographing unicorns in a mystical grove.

And then someone flicked the gravity back on.

Smooth and dry and cool
White and curving ribs
Spine to sternum cage a heart.
Yours and mine.

A lung, a liver, ghostly hover
Insubstantial.

I can reach my fleshy hand to your shoulder,
But instead of consolation, I touch
The glowing, the beating.
Not a caress, but a testing.

To hold you too closely
Is a meshing of bones
As of two sets of fingers.


That sort of covers it, I think.

It's not fucking fair that I always have to be the one to give up. Because I know I can't possibly be wrong all the time. But that's how it has to be. I try to make you prove that you actually give a shit, and when I can't get any such thing from you, I go back to not caring whether or not you do because it's easier than this feeling of collapse.

Don't I sound happy? Don't I?

Try to be extra nice to me this month...my ass.

Speaking of strange dreams, last night's included a ski-jump, a monorail and inflatable dragons as well as a guy who tried to scam me out of my student ID.

PS: It worked for Kat so maybe it'll work for me. frilly dresses.

On such a beautiful day as today, it's impossible to be pessimistic.


I did have some very strange dreams last night: about traveling with my mother like Anywhere But Here; about the mice that live or used to live in our kitchen, and about what mutations might be caused by roach spray. Basically, that is to say that while mice randomly skittered through the kitchen, Kat and I fussed over a little kitten with a strangely shaped head that was mostly white, black, and magenta and some albino cat-rabbit with long ears. That part of the dream ended with me following mice back to the holes in the walls and taping them over with duct tape.

I have the weirdest subconscious.

I just wrote this long post about everything that's going wrong in my life and everything that's going right as compared to what I expected at the beginning of the term. But I pressed the wrong button and it all went away. So I guess I'll just retell the end which went something like:

I said to the alto section leader today, "People suck." And she said to me, "I'm glad I'm not the only one." What did she mean by that, anyway?

I must just not have any idea how to run my life. I obviously just don't fucking get it. I feel like the Philadelphia public school system. If anyone has any idea of how to do this properly, I'm definitely willing to consider letting you take over for me.

Eaten today:
two bowls of homemade lentil, barley, carrot, celery, alphabet soup
one grilled cheese sandwich
one corn muffin
half of a pomegranite
maybe 7 or 8 pieces of assorted leftover Halloween candy

Except for a couple of the pieces of candy, all of the above were consumed after 5:30 in the evening.

I mopped the entire lower level of my house, today, except for the one runner carpet in the hallway which I vacuumed. I want to not imagine faces at the front door, and I want not to tense when I hear the front door being unlocked. I want the nerve and bravado to be able to just tell someone to fuck off, rather than relying on my self-assured bitchiness to get me through.

I want sense.

I want peace of mind.

I am apparently cute and sweet when I'm half-conscious. I don't know what that means, aside from being a stark contrast to how I normally behave. Does it indicate that sweetness and light is my default state and that during my waking hours, I expend energy into being a nasty bitch? It's a simple explanation: I sometimes get too tired to be mean. More realistically, though, I think it's just that I get too tired to pretend anything. If I'm tired and in a bad mood, I don't even attempt to curb myself, while if I'm tired and just grateful that I have what I have, since I really don't deserve it, I have no energy for pride. I have no means for pretending that the world is damn lucky to have me, and I just have to lay back and be thankful.