20:16 - Saturday, Apr. 16, 2005
blow by blow
I rode a pretty strenuous bike route today on my new mountain bike that should have cost a million trillion dollars but was discounted because it's a bike that only fits people over six feet tall on its lowest setting. It's a good bike, but Boulder is the reigning King Town of bikers, and I kept getting passed by helmet-and-glove-wearing speedbike riders who glided and zoomed effortlessly by on their millimeter-thick tires, feet hardly straining at all, smirking in their brains about the goober who chose to ride a smooth trail on a mountain bike. During the parts the path went into the trees at the base of the mountains or through someone's impeccably watered back garden, hordes of monarch butterflies would hover and skip from one side of the trail to the other, sticking to my shirt and skin as they were swept up by my opposite motion. They would disentangle themselves slowly, for butterflies, and continue circling, fifty meters ahead of their original fluttering zone. I guess they eventually made it back. At one point the world looked like it had been a picture taken through a camera with a lens partially covered by a translucent orange sheet, flapping. It distracted me so much, and the nagging thought that I'd better keep my heavy-breathing mouth shut or I'd end up having butterfly for lunch, that I rode the mostly-uphill trail without really stopping (except to mentally flip off the smug speedbikers). Near the end, the mountains that cradle my house had shrunk in scale to mountains I might have built with legos at age three. It was over 70 and midday. I went downtown to eat a tunafish sandwich and sit on the grass that had a 'Keep Off' sign on it, and listen to a seven year old girl play the same three Suzuki song-exercises on her violin so that sidewalk-mall tourists would give her money. She made more money than the guy who was accompanying himself on the ukelele while his mouth was playing a mounted pipe flute. Damn.
Here is the place that I rode: along the mountains from Canyon and the green stuff to Wonderland Lake.

After that I ate frozen custard and lay around watching some guys play tennis-ball-golf, then bowled with a bunch of drunken student-center employees for free. It was a good day. Good enough to describe it in this sort of blow by blow fashion, anyway.

16:34 - Friday, Apr. 15, 2005
serves me right for trying to brush my teeth
My tooth hurts. I have a cavity I can feel with my tongue. Chewing sucks. But I hate dentists. Novocaine doesn't numb anything for me, not even if they overdose me with it. Cavity filling for me is like having my fingernails pulled out one by one. No, grated off. With sandpaper. So I'm not going to the dentist. Unless they give me nitrous oxide or put me to sleep. My mom won't pay for nitrous because she thinks I fake not being affected by Novocaine. So I'm not going. But my tooth hurts. So I'm drinking a mango smoothie to numb it instead. The funny thing is, it only started hurting after I started brushing after lunch, too. What sense does that make? Serves me right for trying to brush my teeth.

14:14 - Thursday, Apr. 14, 2005
the curse of the tall person
I am eternally cursed with the... uh.. Curse.. of the Tall Person: any shorts I wear, while they may be completely normal shorts that would look completely normal and decent on anyone else, combine with the freakish length of my legs to make me look like a STREETCORNER WHORE.
I decided I'm doing a social experiment to see if I get sent home to change when I get to work.

16:01 - Wednesday, Apr. 13, 2005
Don't Eat Monkeys Month
I keep feeling like I should write a self-help book. Not because I know how to help myself. I don't. Or at least I don't in any sort of organized manner such as a list of goals, or a book with chapters, or even a mental book with mental chapters. I've found it's very hard for me to organize my thoughts when they are held from paper. Sometimes they feel like they belong on paper, but do not belong in my brain, cluttering. Sometimes, though, even on paper, they continue to clutter. This is one of those times.
If I were to write a self-help book it would be the truest interpretation of the title ever to be applied to the genre: self-help: helping myself. I don't understand how authors of those things think that the same method applies to everyone. If it did, once one was written, there would be no more depression (lack of lustre), obesity (lacking the ability to stop), anxiety attacks (loss of logical reasoning power), stagnation (stuck-in-a-rut-ted-ness), etc., etc., and that would be that. My self-help book would be what every self-help book should: an organization of thoughts, a list of goals, a brainspattering of trash that should have been purged long ago but was instead trapped in the folds of my brain, cluttering. I think I've gone in a circle. I think I've realized fully for the first time that this journal truly would have worth if no one read it but me, even if no one read it including me, if it just vanished into nothingness as soon as I hit the 'done!' button and I never saw it again. All that it is is just that it's nice when other people see it too, and it's nice that I can go back and see what I've written years into the future.
If I were to write a self-help book it would be too personal to sell in the bookstore. It would have things like 'You need to start consistently brushing your teeth twice a day instead of just once' in it, and people would be 'Ewww! Not everyone brushes their teeth twice a day??!?!' and other people would be 'I totally ALREADY do that so I'm totally cured of my problem' and no one would admit it had any relevance, and, OK, it doesn't. Let me try again. It would have things like 'Don't cling to people and depend on them to make you happy,' and trust me, no one wants to admit they cling. Or used to cling, or have clinging tendencies, or have a distant relative that clung (is clung a word? I've written its present incarnation way too many times to be objective about this), because clingy is the antithesis of desirable, and God Forbid You're Not Fucking Desirable.
Today marks the beginning of Don't Eat Monkeys Month. From April 13th to May 13th, don't eat monkeys. If you travel to Africa, mostly the affluent areas, and there is a super-expensive item on the menu and you don't know what it is, it's probably monkey: don't eat it. These monkeys are becoming extinct.
My personal policy is that I only don't eat things that are endangered. Cows and chickens: not endangered. Pigs: not endangered. Monkeys: endangered. Don't Eat Monkeys Month. Make a difference.

17:36 - Friday, Apr. 08, 2005
nine year olds in the bathroom slowly morph into philosophy majors
Oh god, gross!!
Would you mind?
Would you mind? That's just nasty.
Why would you say that?
You were picking your nose!
You were spying through the crack in the bathroom door!
At least I wasn't picking my nose. People stop doing that when they're five.
Why were you looking?
It doesn't matter why, it's still nasty whether people are looking or not.
It's not nasty to spy on people through the bathroom door? But are you judging the fact that I was picking my nose?
Yes!
Why?
Because it's nasty!
So you're saying you're freaking out because I was doing something nasty.
Exactly.
You don't think spying through the bathroom door isn't nasty?
You would have been doing it whether I was spying or not.
You would have been spying whether I was doing it or not.
I wasn't spying. I just happened to notice your finger up your NOSE!
So if guys drill a hole in a girls locker room door and spy on the girls undressing, is that OK?
NO!
What if the girls were all picking their noses?
What?!
If the undressing girls were all picking their noses, which party is the nasty party?
Both!
Okay, with is the morally reprehensible one?
The boys.
Okay, so you're freaking out that I'm doing something nasty when you are actually doing something morally reprehensible. I'm going to tell the ethics committee.
You really want the ethics committee to know that you were picking your nose in the bathroom?
Hell, yes, I do. Wouldn't you?

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