20:54 - September 16, 2002
the same old same
It is cold in here and it is cold out there. We just had the fakest fire drill you can possibly imagine... the alarm didn't even work, it was just someone shouting into a megaphone... and feet clattered down the hardly-used, dusty back staircase in a panic. I stood at the bottom and watched this through the spaces in between the stairs. Outside, Creepy Steve's cigarette end glowed yellow-gold and his eyes glowed green-gold as he nervously smoked and fidgeted. The red-gold everyone was expecting to be visible through the windows was absent. See, they'd told us they would let us know when there would be a drill, and they hadn't told us anything. I might have been the only one who knew there was nothing amiss; my nose tells me that every time. It wrinkles at perfume and perks up at grass and closes up over the sewer, but it will always tell me when something is 'just a drill'.

I've set the synthesizer up to consistently stay on orchestral, so I don't have to keep programming sounds and use that as an excuse for why I don't write more than I do. It's programmed, it's set, and I'm simply lazy.

Everyone who I talk to keeps telling me how happy and well-adjusted and adult I sound, and I can't help but wonder what it is they've been smoking (or what it is I've been smoking, more like..). I've noticed a change, but not necessarily a change in this direction. The highs and lows are more intense here. My trustworthy Paxil is pushed into the background. There is no 'home' to escape to when school gets to be too much; school IS home and home is school and in many ways I love that, but it's overwhelming much of the time; just as I'm about to have a nice sulky snuggle in bed all by my lonesome, Ashley will come in and turn on her rap music or the boozehounds will come by looking for my roommates, or the guy from down the hall who looks like he's twelve will want to borrow a quarter... but never will it be someone interrupting my solitude who I actually want to see. It won't be anyone who will come in and shut the fuck up and just lie down in bed with me and speak without words or even not speak without words, and give me a hug and be warm comforting heavy weight.

I've found something akin to that comfort in Andrew and Chris's apartment. You don't always have to have an agenda all the time, with them. There is none of the sexual tension that's so pervasive among everyone here, the 'freshman lay panic', I call it; there's no rush to go out and make social ties. Their apartment is a lounge. We smoke and eat and play cards and fall asleep and play music and discuss things that make no sense to any of us, but it doesn't matter. It's not the kind of easiness that would make me want one of them to come and lie in my bed with me, though. It's something different. It's something I don't have, not here.

I keep forgetting it's only the fourth week.

My weight is still slipping away.

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