the level of nerdiness is astounding!
i'm sure shawn among other senior senile TIPsters would approve.

in other news, my driving partner is the best friend of a prostitute, and she purportedly smokes like a chimney, and one time very brightly and sweetly told us this story about her aunt who was pulled over for driving with a taillight out, though the officer was awfully nice and let her off when he realized she couldn't afford insurance and also saw her little kids in the back of the car.
she's a really nice person, though.
she said this thing about how she doesn't like to be friends with many girls because they always start drama, and i almost said "amen to that!"
i really believe her, too, when she talks about all the fights that she gets in that she doesn't start. she is defending her honor.
really, she is a total man, but she has this great raspy alto laugh that isn't a giggle at all, and isn't a belly laugh, but is appreciative.
she's so calm and sweet all the time.
also a pretty damn good driver. (she's been driving before plenty though: taking her prostitute friend to work. i swear i'm not kidding. i couldn't be making this up.)

praising the fall back,
glynis

(it is after one and i feel fiiiiiiiiiiine!)

there are a whole lot of stories i want to tell, all of a sudden.

I AM A BIRD NOW:
antony and the johnsons. he is... crazy awesome. this dude won the mercury prize, but that's not why i like him. i like him because i was reading the new york times magazine a while back and there were some letters inbetween quotation marks, and somehow i heard him say them. i despise quotes, especially when they are so easily taken out of context.

we should all have WABAC machines instead, in which we can storytell, intricately programming the timbre of a passing voice into a contextualizing hologram.

i'm deluded. i'm deluded and i love it.

i also hate music prizes. what the fuck are they all on about, anyway? this song is for me, not for deconstruction.

that's a contradiction. what a blatant contradiction; i HAVE to love it.*

CRAVING CATHARSIS:
is pixar the new disney?** apparently, mr. disney's rainbow-belching dream factory split into several different components: dreamworks, pixar, and disney itself. somebody told me that dreamworks was still a part of disney, but they're factioning off. disney is clinging to analog animation, which wouldn't be a problem, but all their great minds left them for pixar, to dabble in new medias of... media. they left disney to flail, without their former inspired direction, reduced to hawking straight-to-DVD sequels to keep disneyland up and running.

SHOUTING GERONIMO:
so some middle schoolers vandalized our set, after it was accidentally broken.
poor set.
poor cool middle schoolers that get a bad rap after a few of them fuck it up for everyone else.

when i was in middle school, i really thought that sentiment would change. it sucks ass that it really hasn't, and that i know now that it never will.

someday i'll be sitting in a dark room gold leafing a new gospel.
the self made monk.

i have to say more with less phrases. maybe i'll just start writing in hieroglyphics and speaking in a series of facial contortions, massive glaring gesticulations and clicks and beeps; i might as well.

pick up a baton and preach to the choir,
gin, troubadour through and through

*it's funny, the talk about transcendentalism. i've been kind of a trancendentalist all my life, apparently, and never knew it. and since the principle is that thought is that thoughts are bound to be repeated, isn't that ironic? at least now i can explain more with fewer cluttered sounds.

good.
**this is the news that matters to me; why do i never get it in my own effing newspaper? i want to know why i have to read the sunday times between inhaled snacks in order to hear NEWS. i'm not blaming the media, i'm blaming people with low standards.
the only thing that makes me sad about the sunday times (we can't afford to get it every day, plus it was just taking up space, because no one ever had time to read the whole thing) is the severe lack of science and comics sections.
they were my favorite parts.

[alack!]

so i was reading this article in the smithsonian and i've decided i'm going to be an ethnobotanist when i grow up.

it's weird how much i'm amazed with plants.
i mean, can you imagine having the tenacity to live in one place all your life and bid goodbye to your little seeds and not follow them?
there must be a sadness every time that new alluring wind blows.
poor mommy plants.

animals are cool and all, but PLANTS!
people identify with animals because they can move like we do, and talk in a way, and all mammals reproduce in the same, obvious way.

but PLANTS!
what mystery!

have you ever met someone who was a FRUIT whisperer?
i think not!

can you believe i've never had more than one kind of banana?
that's INSANE!
do you know how many kinds of bananas there are in the world?
A WHOLE HELLA LOT!

i mean, in earlier times, when people were actually as enthralled with travel as they should still be, (okay, by "enthralled with travel" i mean "enthralled with claiming natives' territory") bananas were brought from southeast asia to all over the world. (SCARAMOUCHE: ALL over the world! D'ANGELO:All over the world! RAFAEL: All over the world!) carried by arab traders, they landed in africa in the first or second millenium BC, where they flourished, and spanish explorers even brought bananas to latinamerica, and now we think they've ALWAYS been there. it's so crazy that we've started this chain of evolving plantains... all over the world!)
so why are we so homogonized?
ask your local grocer for some new kind of banana that ISN'T your everyday Cavendish.
amaze some people today with your vast scope of appreciation.

CELEBRATE BIODIVERSITY!
(watch the ass of my shoddy jeans for future bulletins; i'll be scribbling phrases i don't want to let go of wherever there are uncovered stiches. it's weird that nowadays without words on me i feel bare. i figure if teenage girls are going to be billboards for something, they might as well advertise their own causes. i refuse to wear logos anymore. they better PAY me for fucking advertising! bitches.)

it makes me really mad that no one wants to have an adventure anymore, because they think if you don't do something that people will put you in a history book for, the adventure won't have mattered. and there are all these new fears that we've created for ourselves, like "what will my next door neighbor who i never talk to anyway think of me?" and "well, i'll bet there's already a patent for that ANYWAY. (sigh)" and "there are smarter people than me. if i tried to do this, i'd just screw it up. i'd better let someone else take care of it."

that's how i know I rationalize. but i also have moments detached from the context of anyone's life, and i get to wondering.

do you think CAVEMEN gave a shit who discovered and domesticated fire first? i'm pretty sure the caveman who did it wasn't demanding royalties every time he saw smoke at a neighbor's cave.

cavemen just do it for themselves.*

so i'd just like to take this moment to commemorate the spirits of all those people that spurred other people to do things that you never HEAR about.
like the housewife that technically invented teflon before some lousy bastard entrepreneur stole her humble idea and made all the money off of it.**
like every muse that talked all around the exact word they wanted before the next person connected with it and rephrased the same idea better and impressed some superior.

those people are adventurers, too.

i had a secret adventure like that yesterday night.
i exorcised me some emotional demons.
i was making up interpretive dances that i ended up being bad at.
i have a dance for both my freudian selves: my intellectual one looks kind of like the water cycle, and my emotional one looks kind of like hopscotching.

to think, if sarah had stayed, she might have been able to dance around the imaginary campfire with me.
or it might not have happened.
it's always the minute sarah leaves that i do all the weird things.
maybe it's the refrigerator light phenomenon: any given person only does truly magical things when they're on their own, and they have to summon their muse's spirit with their own.

her dance looks a lot like flying.

i have this theory that when you're young, those tripping and floating dreams you have are a set of instructions that we have been taught to ignore.

the shape of your soul is an infinite coil situated behind your face, and at the bottom of this coil, there's a weight that strains against it as it uncoils. and when you're young, it's all dense and packed tightly together in your hindbrain, that place where humanity branched out from.*** (growing up is like mini-evolution.) when you grow up, other people are agents of an unselfish cosmos, unravelling and pulling the coil of your soul slowly out of you until it all joins the floating mass of spirit, which all mixes together and then re-enters new humans. that weight is left after the soul-coil has broken away, and it holds you to the ground.
the moment when you die is that small snap.
it's kind of like as you grow up, your soul expands, and thus, your universe expands, until the weight of everything gets to be too much for a body and it flees you.
like osmosis.

so i've decided that when i die i'm going to be fertilizer.

all hopscotched out,
guinea (i'm so fascinated that my name can be shortened to a kind of slurry variant on what i see as an adjective that describes the alcoholic beverage. i'm ginny: gin-like! or you could say it like it was the name of the country that JUST gained independence from france in 1958. that's crazy. i love my nickname. unbeknownst to them, all my friends are subconscious geniuses. humanity impresses me something insane.)

*do you think there's such a thing as doing something just to make yourself proud? does it count if you do something that YOU know is awesome, but no one ever tells you it is? or is it just a phenomenon propagated by legend? i really wanna know how much one has to do before they deserve to be called an adventurer. how qualified do you have to be to be titled "unique"? when you want to tell someone an original idea so much it burns you out, and then it turns out they want you to read a book that's exactly like that, how original were you in the first place? the stars don't make me feel half as small as a works cited page.
there ARE no more original human stories.
just new contexts for telling them.
**god, i hope i'm not spreading misinformation. nothing makes me angrier than how gullible i am when it comes to learning things. people are bound to put their spin on everything they ever write or tell you, and it's too bad. i just want to propagate the facts. i used to accidentally plagerize when i was in second grade, and i have never forgiven myself. it's too bad that that's the way culture works. cat stevens was angry with the flaming lips for stealing his tune, (hear for yourself: "father and son" vs. "fight test") but it could really have been an accident. they could have heard the first in passing and had a long-ago memory and it could have bubbled up through that huge human universe that's the subconscious, and they could have used it, forgetting where it came from.
hell, you could argue that some people (cough, andrew lloyd webber, cough) plagerize themselves! they learn what riffs work for them and play the same ones over and over instead of trying to voyage in someone else's legal waters.

i mean, how the hell do you navigate the subconscious?

[it's all a mystery.]
***such a romantic notion i have. the hind-brain to me is about how my ancestors learned how to breathe and make their hearts beat so that their great, great grandchildren could just build on what the collective humanity already knew. truly, unconscious functions are AMAZING.

adults = overgrown children.

case in point:

"Damn John Jay! Damn everyone that won't damn John Jay! Damn every one that won't put lights in his window and sit up all night damning John Jay!"

the finer points of history make me laugh out loud.

[mayhap trivia is not so trivial.]

do not refute it!
you know it to be true!

the great human drama blunders on, magnificently.

lights in my window,
glynis (mahahaha-- i wanna crack up so hard that it'll crack my POT!)

A.R.T: tomorrow is picture day. at least i can conclude that this is the worst i'll look all year. (speaking of historical evidence tainted by personal opinion...)

MAHAHAHAHA!

WOW. for serious. woah.
(i said, this afternoon, numerous times, to no one in particular.)

so i didn't relate the two last adventures of my summer.
but now they're DEFINITELY not fresh anymore.
some adventures are just not for relating.

i had the best idea for a shojo manga EVER.
i think i could even make it not cheesy. ("impossible!" you shout.)

i want to write my senior exit on comics as a misunderstood art form, but i'm not a visual art major, so i'm not sure if that'll fly.

i finally have a final schedule that i CONSIDER mine.

1. Spanish III with Gomez
3. The Best English with Whiteside
5. APUSH, starring Joyce
7. APES with Booker

2. Pre-Calc with my champion of justice*, Goodwin
4. Playwriting and directing, feat. Delaney**
6. Women's Acting Ensemble, a.k.a touchy-feely-happy-fun-time in the presence of MO
8. Honors A Acting for Delaney, who dominates my day

and HOW.

i made ben a mixed CD for random gift day. i figured, what could be more random, on random gift day?

i hope he's into WEIRD SHIT, because that's what we're all about.

haha, i frightened my punk rock friends in the car on the way to and from sunset beach. i put in kid koala and jimi hendrix and rocked out, and everyone else was bemused.
some days i wonder if i was placed correctly.

it's not so bad, being a feral nomad girl.
some days it's so good to pick up and move all over and just talk to every person. but it's getting harder. i think as people get older, they get more selective and settled in their ways. it scares me. i feel like i'm losing an important power that i have.

or maybe i'm just getting more accustomed to the banality of life.

god, i hope i never do.

i found the perfect monologue.

i don't like monologues without plays for context surrounding them.

zach laws is such a good kid. he has the confidence to take delaney's playwrighting class, and two years in a row, no less. just out of love. it's like he's not even worried if he'll get college credit. that's beautiful.

MO says that you stress and you stress about college, and then you get in, and you wonder what you were ever worried for. i believe it. so many of my ambitions will be utterly stomped, and yet, i just can't bring myself to mind at all. i'm having so much fun.

i've transcended the need to see a high score to affirm myself.
i'm finally learning the way i want to!
for LEARNING'S sake.

we laughed in joyce's class today for about forty-five minutes straight about our pets, and susanna hiccuped and we laughed harder. apparently northwest has a pet bum, and chancey is his crackhead ambassador.
the bum's name is larry.
i don't think i've ever seen him, but i think i know who he is.

i wish i knew ellie better, but i guess if i'm lucky i will by the end of the year.

i wish that i could call sarah, but i'm so tired.
guess i should get used to it.

adulthood is all about restraint.

that SUCKS.

i think jaime is scared of me. i got way too excited in whiteside's class, and then retained that level of energy through the rest of the day AND rehearsal.

maybe i wouldn't be so exhausted if i weren't such a burnout.
but i think i am by nature.

we talked about self-segregation in WAE, and it felt good to admit that it is a natural phenomenon, now.

why do we let ourselves get so comfortable with one tribe of people?

it seems trite, expected.

but very true. there are plenty of people now who by virtue of vibe make me feel as though i shouldn't be allowed to be the thing that i am.

i'm almost glad i can shoulder the burden of the holocaust for all the people who were around when it went down.
talk to any student nowadays and they'll say it was shoved down their throat, but i don't think it was a guilt-induced moral. it was probably more just to get it off the chests of those involved.

struggle against entropy, futilely, but prettily,
glynis

*he actually WENT to ms. eury FOR me when no one else would even help me, and delivered the schedule i had wanted TO me. goodwin is the best. he really is. i don't want to take math with anyone but him. he lives up the street from me and someday this summer i'll bring him fried chicken.
**to think, i used to be intimidated by that man. he is FANTASMIC! i LOVE him! for serious, i'm pretty sure this year will change my life. he's taking paternal leave to help his wife wipe baby ass after the little monkey's born. how about that! isn't that just beautiful?

woke up at three AM saturday morning, went back to bed at three AM sunday morning.

inbetween:
seriously trespassed on other peoples' memory lane.
sarah's mom picked me up at eight PM yesterday and brought me into sarah's room, and showed me sarah's pictures of TIP and TIPsters alike. sarah's mom REALLY likes JLLY.

my phone number is on sarah's bulletin board, right under wes'.
my picture is by her bed... who put THAT there?!

i played a couple games of solitaire, read one page of huck finn, decided not to get any more involved in it. i had like ten million pisses before i went to bed at ten-ish. roused at sarah's-mom-proclaimed "insane 'a clock" and had a cup of constant comment and threw my stuff for sosby's in the van, and we were off. had a VERY bad-idea sticky bun and regretted it the whole way to the TIP campus.

driving at three AM is not too bad, especially when you're not the one driving.

we got there way soon and found sarah, and joe/JLLY, and shawn-- not necessarily in that order-- and it's weird to meet people who are disembodied voices to you.* sarah and joe were a heap on the couch, and when she woke up, i swear her eyes were red. she morning-glared through me and then she got her glasses on and she ran into me and knocked me over. it was early and i was gonna just shake shawn's hand, but then i thought "wait, who our age fuckin' shakes hands?" and i hugged him instead. sarah's dad engineered organization of all the bags into the van and we were off again.

everybody and i talked a lot about plenty of things, none of which i remember. i just have this muddy, vague memory of the distinict feeling that it was fun and shawn and JLLY are good people to know. and sarah's especially good to know.

sarah discovered explosions in the sky;

airports are menacing-like purgatory.

we all four hung out on a wet bench outside the airport before shawn had to go, and then we went back outside and i worked on trying to fall into the fountain to keep myself occupied while JLLY and sarah farewelled. i am surprisingly still balanced.

when i was a kid i would climb trees.
then i got older.
i think i'm growing down, now.
maybe we don't just go in one direction. maybe when we get older our internal organs just explode and implode and our cells just go crazy. i want to believe that my insides are like the refrigerator light and that things happen when no one's looking.

sarah's mom removed me from sarah and JLLY and i fell asleep in the car and got up shaky when sarah got in and then didn't care anymore and went back to sleep and woke up and we were at chili's. for some reason, sarah's parents split from us like a reproducin' amoeba and we got a table to ourselves across the restaurant.

it was such a weird thing; i had already encroached so much, but it felt like something i was supposed to do. we talked, and i felt bad that while sarah and her TIPsters had been together for forever, i had been doing something else.

i haven't lived enough. maybe i'm not a liver. maybe i'm a figment of someone else's imagination, invoked by a need for a nomad friend. i guess i am a good outside.

called ree, told her we'd be there, half-lied. well, I was all there.

sarah just wanted to go home. understandable. she needed sleep; a spacer between her home away from home and her abnormal traveling adventures and sleepy summer.

i stayed and partied stupidly. it felt good just to be at theresa's house with all these people that we collectively sorta know, even if they aren't MY people. just means i didn't have to impress anyone.

it was a good day for people and i.
it was early; i wasn't my best, but i never am. and i just don't care. i'll know my best when i get there.

ali and shannon stayed after all the other people filtered out, and we stayed up too late watching constantine, which was a good mediocre movie. keanu reeves can be excused his bad acting i guess, because the movie was not about him. it was about a lesson, which was just this: DON'T SMOKE, KIDS. because people that smoke go STRAIGHT TO HELL.

god sent him nicotine gum. heeeeeeeeeeeee.

watched most of the labyrinth, which i finally understood** because caffeine and lack of sleep and people encouraging stupid ideas = my kind of brilliance. we watched it with the subtitles on, which was actually pho-real brilliant on ali's part. (that is why she's my wife.) i got to hear all the weird undertone shit that the muppet demons muttered, and all the lyrics to the weird-ass songs that i never quite heard. (people who sing should really enunciate. bitches.)

in the morning--afternoon-like thing-- watched batman forever, in which jim carrey is good. i like the riddler, he is much cooler than many supervillains. also, he has a really pimpin' question-mark cane.

dad and erin came and fetched me after a while, and i realized that i hadn't had any lunch, but that wasn't important, because it was already four late. dropped off warm, fuzzy stuffed animals for warm, fuzzy children of a friend of my dad's who took our family pictures. the three-year-old has cancer, but she was very animated and healthy looking when i saw her; i wouldn't have guessed, except that her hair was gone from the chemo. the younger girl really liked baby dolls. really little kids like that are good to visit, because they don't talk so much, so if you're nice to them, you don't have to either. two and three year olds don't care about making pleasant, polite, PC conversation. they like stuffed animals. at the risk of sounding sappy, i'm going to go ahead and hope both of them get the chance to grow up and get as jaded and twisted and R.I.D*** as me and MY friends.

it's only fair.

kids are ok when they aren't yours. i saw one in the harris teeter and i grinned and waved, and this kid was so quiet and just stared at me and saw me laughing and just had this huge, shit eating grin on her face and waved back. we had a moment. a moment in which i was a little sad, because i knew that i would grow up to be a suburban housewife and like it. stupid enforced gender roles. stupid falling in love and settling. stupid future. stupid self awareness.

ervin told me my word was supercalifradjoolisticexpialidocious. he is wrong; it's just "prove". i JUST figured it out.
(his is "code", and i don't know why, it just is.)

how did i get back into thinking?

sarah's room is amazing; it's so HER, i think staying in it made me inspired.
i drew a ruler on my wrist in blue pen and over it i wrote: RANDOM?
by which i meant, 'how random IS random?'
well, there MUST be a statistical way to measure it.
i kinda wish i was smart enough to take that class, but it kinda frightens me.

at least i know i'll never become a mad scientist supervillain; they are MATH geniuses, not english geeks.

what a relief-- knowing my place isn't ALL bad.

i feel like i should finish telling about the rest of sunday, because i'm finishing this entry i WANTED to have finished BEFORE my dad wrested me from the computer to go eat.

i love avocado milkshakes; i wish i knew how to make them.

it was erin's family-given birthday, as opposed to her peer-given birthday.
she got a PS2 and i am only a little jealous.

videogames are not my area of nerdery anyway.

watched the life aquatic w/ zissou, steve. felt like i had been hit by a train in the neck, but laid down and finished watching anyway, and at the end, i wondered why. i went to bed too late.

i'm gonna go to bed early tonight.
well, not too early, but twelve early--just early enough.

gee, i suddenly hope this entry is aesthetically pleasing.

out on a limb,
glynis, buffalo soldier dreadlock rasta in her heart

*also made an acquaintance of sarah's TIP ian (who was wearing one of those employee shirts that said "mitch" on it, so i didn't REALIZE i was making HIS acquaintance)
**i had already deduced one thing ABOUT the kids that watched labyrinth as kids-- they are fucked up in their little freudian psyches after watching david bowie knock about in tight tights.
but what the movie is REALLY about is the triumph of reality over imagination, which is why all my friends hate sarah for not staying with jareth, king of the muppet demons.
***apparently it is european and trendy-all-the-rage to punctuate phone numbers with periods now. i read it in the newspaper, so it must be true.
here's what's allegedly wrong with hyphens:
-they direct the eye in the wrong kind of way?
-they take up too much space
-they are too american.

(reject all american, you all american rejects!)

...

--see you later, space cowboy.

listening to hendrix and bob marley for the first time that counts, and i couldn't be happier.
led zeppelin next.
(ervin has added jim croce and crosby, stills 'n nash to the list. arrr. researchin'.)

i haven't written in a while.
i keep feeling like i could, and then i go watch TV.
television is sick and i hate it.
i can quit any time i want!
meh.

the routine is a drug, the television is the opiate of the masses.

have been hanging out with ree a lot as of late.
she is refreshingly booze-honest, and we have gotten to the point in our relationship where we don't have to talk to one another to keep out of social awkwardness.
she and her parents took me to san francisco, and we stayed at the hotel monaco: her mom and dad in one room, and us in another. we were up the street from some galleries, and one had some original dalis in it, and i gaped a little inside.

i should have taken notes, but i'm really getting into the braindead summer doldrums.
i can't go by days, but here are the places we went:

-on day one, Chinatown, basically. it was huge; there was lots of tourist crap, but open markets, too. we took the trolly places, and it was windy and cool and a little gray. when you look down some of the hilly streets in san fran, you can really almost see the whole city and some of the bay. it's crazy. lombard street is NOT the crookedest street there is, but it WAS pretty damn crooked. there were all these gardens and trees and such beautiful architecture.

-in the way of museums (in no particular order): the exploratorium (it's like discovery place, except huger and full of much more sciencey things.* it was in this big architectural dome surrounded by a pond with all these landscaped things, too, and in the rich part of town.** my favorite exhibit was where they had dry ice subliming at the bottom of a tube and you could blow bubbles and they would stay spinning heavily for a long time as the carbon dioxide gas from the dry ice diffused inside them. they just kinda hung there, sinking and sinking soooo slowly like sheer, empty, vapid little planets; it was awesome.) the streetcar museum (a little non-profit dive that was also where you can see all the cables running the reconstructed streetcars that people ride in now.) the aquarium (fish are so pretty. whenever i see them, i feel like becoming a fashion designer. seriously. and for some reason, there was also this exhibit on chocolate there, too. i don't know why; another scheme to get tourists to buy crap.) the asian art museum (i was trying to learn things, but we hadn't eaten since breakfast, and we walked all day, every day. we were so tired, we just kind of sat down on a bench in the tibet exhibit and stared blankly. the place was three floors, and we got there like an hour before it closed. we were not going to see everything in detail anyway.) oh, oh, and we saw a comics museum that was more like this little comics shrine to certain history, and i forgot to ask if there was any special comic history that had to do with san francisco in particular, but oh well.

[research time!!]

-in the way of tourist treks: there was alcatraz (possibly my favorite thing of all; we went out on a cruise boat with a ton of other tourist types. i was stupid and didn't wear sunscreen and got burned walking all over the island, but there's so many stories to that place; it was really fantastic. alcatraz wasn't just an island penitentiary, it was also a community for the officers who held down the fort militia-style, not to mention their wives ((who planted shit everywhere, so the island wasn't just a rock anymore)) and their kids ((some of whom developed relationships from afar with the inmates.***)) i took a lot of pictures there; it was so damn pretty.) we also went to union square (right up the street from our hotel) and ghirardelli square (formerly known as a chocolate factory, now shopping, shopping and more crap to buy. oh, yeah, there was also the ghirardelli store, but i just had a sample and left. i ended up buying fifteen dollars worth of truffles to share with my family anyway at the airport. so much for virtue.****) we took buses all morning and early afternoon to get to haight street, where all the hippie dives are. i didn't buy much, but i smiled a lot.

-we met notable people: a man named james toolate (one of his ancestors was at the end of the trail of tears and some dude told him that it was too late to buy any land there, because he was one of the last to get there. the ancestor didn't understand what it meant, but he liked the phrase toolate. i swear, that was the last name on the guy's vending license!) who sold me on a fork bent into a hand-like pendant (the peace sign! he bought antique cutlery and made art with it.) ree's looks like a squid chomping something on one side and a cello or something on the other.
there was also a guy we sat by on one of the numerous buses we took all over who talked in a voice like scaramousche's. he made me smile, and i think for some reason i will always remember him, even though i have no clue what his name is or who he is.
and then there were the two israelis on the golden gate bridge, one of whom shook my hand and politely conversed and hit on ree and i and ran away when i mentioned that we were sixteen.
and the drunk asian-american dudes at the bus stop back from the wharf who spoke in ebonics.
and the sweet gay (also chipper) black man who waited on us at the crab shack.
and all the people we passed that gave us directions: coffeeshop lady near haight street, yuppie man on rich street washing car (it was beautiful down there, too. and clean, SO clean. and fewer buses, more cars. heh heh.), aforementioned chipper black man from restaurant.

it's funny what you remember.

oh, and sage advice:
-don't fall asleep chewing gum, that makes you drool. just sayin'.
(this morning it was so effing hot i could only mow the front and sides of the lawn. my mom woke me up early ((nine. i am in SO much trouble when school starts.)) but by the time i wasn't blinking stupidly anymore, it was a hundred degrees already. i fell asleep after a cold shower, ((the gum-drool was what woke me up an hour or so later)) and my lunch felt more like a second breakfast. heh. i am really hopeless. i get nothing accomplished at all.)
-pack a sandwich if you're going on a five hour flight; you just might need it.
(i like shorter flights; they tend to take place on smaller, rumblier, less stable planes with windows. thus, built in entertainment!)
-cold showers are a godsend
(san francisco was in the sixty/seventy degree range with breezes and fog and the like, and it is twice the degrees here what it was there at night. BLAAAGH. the time change was also -3 hours, so i could stay up later and wake up later by my usual time and have the clock say something more morning-person-y there, like 8:20 when it would be 11:20 normally. i enjoyed that; it made me feel less like a slovenly teenager.)

i bought ree's birthday present yesterday, but it wasn't what i set out to get her.
i hope she likes.

i can't believe there is still more lawn to be mowed.
i want more comics. (i'm thinking about broadening my horizons and checking out some marvel, but i'm not quite sure which superhero chronicles are good and which are dead. ((if anyone would care to enlighten me...)) i checked out "the amazing adventures of the escapist" from the library, and some of the stories were wonderful, and a couple were pointless. there's a ((fictional?)) book about the comic writer and illustrator themselves, called "the adventures of kavalier and clay". my mother says we have it in the house somewhere, and i am determined to find it.)
seeing as how if i DON'T get sidetracked, i'll just have to actually read real live LITERATURE. for SCHOOL like.
and then i won't be able to PROCRASTINATE anymore on my ESSAY.
(nooooo!)
heh.

she'll be over here, resisting my latin charms,
glynis-getting-older, maybe even savvier

[oh no, the dam!]

*i saw it in the gift shop. a comic book... ABOUT SCIENTISTS. oh, god, i want it a lot.
**there weren't any homeless people HERE. i told ree "because if they come HERE, they get SHOT." they were everywhere else. i guess it must be relatively better to be homeless in california, because the weather is nicer there, and there are lots of parks one could stay in.
***a thought: i wonder if the officers' kids identified with the inmates, seeing as how they were locked in, as sheltered kids tend to get. one of the stories of three officers' boys escaping almost seems to parallel the story about the three inmates who escaped from alcatraz (they never DID find them.)
****my dad got home from georgia (seeing his birth relatives) the day after i got back from san francisco and brought home three different kinds of cake in chunks. too much chocolate in this damn house; my family should hurry up and eat those damn truffles before i do. it's weird; we never have a steady supply of junk food in our house. either there's too much to focus on at once or there's nothing at all.

first, THE QUESTION:

good names for bands:
-apoplexy! (they are a hardcore british band; there is no hope you will EVER understand what they are saying)
-danger squad (or something, what was it? it was something like that, i remember it sounded really nerdy and fun and was a d word followed by another word that invoked a bandish feeling... you were going to play the imaginary guitar, remember? tell me what that was; that is going to drive me crazy.)

dance break!

too bad it will be bed for me soon.

wah.
i wanna stay uuuuuuuuuuup!
but it is not good for me.

we drip with a rich sense of golden, syrupy irony,
gin

maybe bed sooner tonight than last night.

today: day one of driver's ed. it is some kind of torture to daydream of the road in a class dedicated to teaching it to you. i superimpose my connections to a parallel universe in which i drive... spacecrafts, cars... not FAST, per se, but smoothly. i would rather be stuck in traffic than in some fucking north meck classroom with paper signs. thought about making friends with the other kids around. (the only person i know in my class is bianca, and i don't know her that well.) but for some reason i just don't feel like i should. i don't know if it would be worth the effort. only one kid looked interesting, and he sat with a table full of boys at lunch. shit, i can't go talk to a table full of boys. so i sat and contented myself with an internal mutter of "necessary evil, necessary evil" and tried to stay alert.

i am combating the constant drone of "all you teenagers are the same, all you teenagers are the same, we have to tell you not to do stupid things, or you wouldn't be here for thirty fucking hours".

i think i'm doing it rather well.

neutral, neutral, everything is gray and neutral.

i guess it's better than me standing on my desk shouting "i am NOT a bad driver, assholes!" at the little edutational movie about all the mama's BABIES that DIE. i just found myself in a place where i'm not normally. a good place. a place where i just don't give a shit who dies and who lives.

there are some things about the typical teenager that are highly underrated. confidence is necessary. fuck people who tell you it's not.

we all got up and put our hands on the little plastic wheel and hand over handed and ten o clock and two o clocked and punched in and out in a two minute individual instruction clock. i looked to my left and right and turned (hurriedly; i was one of the last people to go. there was exactly thirty some seconds of class, and we were exactly one minute late to get out of class.) and i swear i almost saw the road.

it's weird; driving calms me. it drives me to crazy to be in this house, so knowing that someday i will leave it actually stops me and makes me less nervous.
i trust that the people around me will more or less execute the actions they need to.
i trust that i will more or less be able to ignore the thrum and focus on the road.

learning the thing is all that is important.

all those levers and lights and wheels and pedals are begging to be put to use.
i have been hoping to drive since the day i was born.

i went out tonight in the half-rain, lightning arching and webbing over the sky everywhere, and it felt good to be out in it.

there is nothing anyone can say that will stop me from driving.

i used to be ashamed of cliche teen things, but sarah is right. there's no real cliche.
there is what is real, and what is fake.

meg called me a few minutes ago. she and everyone else in the world are back from the nevada thespians trip. i hope i get let out at precisely two thirty on thursday.
i want to see what other sappy things there are that i can fight for.

there's so much bureaucracy to be penetrated!,
gin