13:06 - June 06, 2003 so good
Maybe this is a little late, since the story's two days old, but we sat in the drive-thru of Popeye's Chicken & Biscuits, which, incidentally, has the slowest service of any drive-thru I've ever been to ever (I think there were four cars in line and it took us about a half hour), and we rolled down all the windows and roared 'BISCUITS!!! BISCUITS!!' Also, the ordering window asked Nora's car's ass what it wanted to order. The line was moving so slow they probably figured the cars MUST have changed by then. But no. We didn't think quick enough to order a separate meal for the car's ass, but we should have. Popeye's biscuits are like cakey butter. SO GOOD.
23:26 - June 03, 2003 freer than me
There is all this stuff all over my desk. So and so called, a newspaper clipping for how to make prospective employers notice you, some new summer cell phone numbers of people I've jotted down, the info of the customer service guy at Dell... my hands are drowning in everything I've done and everyone I've talked to since I've been here but I still feel like I've done nothing. I have been home for four weeks, but my memories of my last days in Boulder are much, much clearer than anything that's happened since I've been home. It's different than depression. I don't feel any urgent sense or need to escape my 'daily tortures', but I sure as hell do need a jolt of some sort. I'm not sure which is worse. The other way I have writing material and I learn something ('balance again') from all of it, eventually, even though I'm positive I'm going to die DURING it all. (This melodramatic soul-searching, repeated, has GOT to stop.)
And living with self-imposed limits agrees with me. The college way of eating only what you can afford (not much) rather than what your parents decadently buy for you, and everywhere you go being somewhere you can get to by public transportation, so it's a journey rather than just a straight line (though aimless driving is certainly a big loss), rather than just driving wherever you want and not even thinking about why you're going there, and having to tell YOURSELF when to come home and how much to smoke or not to smoke or to drink or not to drink and when to stop the music and turn off the lights and be quiet, and to have to care about cleaning your room because you're actually worried about stepping on things, not because someone else doesn't want to look at it... the whole college way has really grown on me, and it's hard to come back. I can't wax poetic about minimalism when I'm surrounded by decadence, I just can't. In Nick's room with the avocado plants being the most noticeable thing about the decor, it's much easier. Even in Andrew's, where the decor was discarded pizza boxes and cigarette cartons and ripped posters and bottles filled with ash, and spills everywhere, and bare mattresses... there wasn't this air of possessions being untouchable, or things to hoard... things were just around, to use, to kick out of the way, to toss from hand to hand. Instead of being an air of waiting, it was an air of living.
If I had the courage, I would spend every last penny in every one of my bank accounts and hit bottom just to feel what it feels like. I kept hearing people complain about how they were broke and when they said it, they actually were broke; they couldn't just go to the ATM and take out more. They had to wait until somehow some more money came their way and then they would spend it on whatever they'd been holding back on. You'd think 'irresponsible', but really, they were freer than me by far.
23:21 - June 02, 2003 everything forever
If you shut your eyes right going down Sheridan you can just see splotches of headlight and traffic light and streetlight, yellow and white and green and red like the only beacons in a tunnel that you can't see the curves to. I didn't do it in the ravines because it would have been like a rollercoaster in the dark and bouncing my head on the window..
And if you think right, if you arrange your brain in a certain way, you can see why every single thing is beautiful, or at least momentous, and how, if you tried, you could think about everything forevever and be happy about it.
16:11 - June 01, 2003 dilemma
In the shower I remembered one day near the end of freshman year of high school, when I was walking into the band wing with Camille and loudly expressing my anguish at not being able to choose between these two guys that I could be dating. I didn't name them then, (they were Robbie and Wes, I'm sure) but I was waving my arms around and being dramatic, and Aubrey the junior percussionist that I had had an insane crush on for most of the year noticed, even. Maybe I wanted him to. But not much could have made him look up from practicing his marimba scales.
During band that day I went into the music library to find an extra bassoon part and Aubrey followed me in and shut and locked the door behind us. I looked up as he dragged the spare directors chair out from under the corner desk and sat down, tilting up his chin and reaching out a foot to pull another chair out. 'Sit down,' he said, and I sat down, decidedly shocked: first of all, he paid me no attention, ever, and second of all, well, that's all, I suppose. I sat down anyway and looked at him expectantly, and probably warily.
'So tell me,' he started, 'what's this dilemma I hear about?'
'Dilemma?' I asked.
'I just overheard you two in the hallway,' he said. 'Something about two boys. Tell me.' He stopped for a beat and took his hair out of its wild ponytail, smoothed it back, re-tied it. 'Maybe I can help.'
'Oh,' I said, bewildered. I should have asked 'why', which would have been a fair question, but I just told him without questioning; after all, I worshipped the boy then - if he had been willing to go out with me there would have been no question in my mind concerning the other two. 'I have two boys that I have to choose between,' I told him, 'and it's a hard decision.'
'I know that part,' he said impatiently. 'Give me names, give me situations. Or, you don't have to give me names if you don't want, but give me something to work with.'
'Wes lives in Wheaton,' I began haltingly, 'but he's somewhat less weird than Robbie, who lives here but is a maniac, I think... although Wes is Christian and that could be just as problematic, and both of them are clearly interested, but I'm having some trouble deciding since it's strange that I even CAN decide at all, since usually things don't happen like that, you know?'
He looked a bit taken aback. Clearly, when I think about it now, though it didn't occur to me then, he was expecting me to include him in the two guys. It was ridiculously obvious that I liked him; even though I thought I was subtle, I wasn't at all. He obviously knew and was planning to take this opportunity to set me straight, or something. 'Welll,' he said, drawing out the word and suddenly looking uninterested, 'I'd go with the one who lives here. I mean... right? Wheaton's fucking far.'
'Actually I was going to go with Wes,' I said, unsure of where he was going with this. 'Um, why do you care?'
'I don't know,' he said, and picked up his drumsticks from the table. 'I thought I could help.'
I stared at him and shook my head, and he smiled and turned around, rolling his eyes, unlocking the door, walking back up the stairs.
'Aubrey!' Mr. Meyer yelled as he came out. 'You do not belong in there.'
'Yeah, whatever,' he mumbled on his way back to the percussion room. Camille was staring hard at me from her place in the oboe section.
I remember the strangest things.
00:34 - June 01, 2003 circles reprised
I thought today as I walked through Barnes and Noble at 10:30 p.m. after having finished the the horror novel I picked up in the bookstore in Boulder that Lara said should change my life since Flatland was going to change hers that I could probably live in a bookstore if I had to. Preferably not Barnes and Noble, though. I still remember how they knocked Kroch's out of business within the month, and I'm sure there are millions of the same story everywhere in the world, like every Starbucks who set up shop down the street from the local beanery, and every Bally right next to the Y. They do have a great selection of books, though, and they don't yell at you for stretching out in the aisles with a book for hours, so I can't be too critical. If I could cartwheel through the aisles it would be even better.
When I'm this bored I find myself doing what someone else I used to know used to do when he felt... I'm searching for the word but there's too many words to search through... it had something to do with surreal but he never used words like surreal. Unattached, disconnected, floating, I think, or something similar. He would describe in precise detail every mundane action he did - 'hang on, i have to go brush my teeth, hang on, i gotta go comb my hair, deodorize, spit my toothpaste out, wash my face, rinse my face....' and he would say all this and wouldn't acknowledge it until later.. 'you realize what i'm doing right?'
I do realize what he was doing, although I didn't really then. I am doing it now. Today I put my clothes on in a specific order and then spent five minutes centering the part in my hair and combing all the tangles out. I never comb my hair. Lately I have been so unmoving, unchanging, completely inactive, that I'm in this floating sort of state where everything bleeds into everything else and I'm even almost too lethargic to actively care or do anything about it. I started off vigorously looking for a job but no one will hire me, and I've slacked off on that and even the multiweekly climb/swims I do are routine. My head isn't centered, and it isn't grounded, either.
But this will pass, like everything has passed, like this beginning of summer lethargy does; it happens every year and I have this and other journals to prove it... everything could be summed up by that one Incubus song, 'Circles'.
