Gifts

It took me so long to realize that the person I want to be most is myself. And Audrey Hepburn.

It was the best thing to ever happen to me.

Little Motel

"I hope that you like it in your little motel, and I hope that the suite sleeps and suits you well."

His Sodom to her Gomorrah
"I'm sorry," she croaked to the dial tone. The receiver laid on the bed next to her, blaring. She held herself tightly on the musty duvet listening to the sounds of defeat. "I'm sorry," she whispered again. He couldn't hear her. He was three thousand miles away, in the arms of his wife. She was tall, blond, and beautifully cliche. She looked great in the figurative apron of marriage. Back at the motel, his worn out lover continued to cry at the telephone, the other end of the conversation he just held to admit that he couldn't see her anymore, that his wife was pregnant, and he's always wanted a son. Lover cried harder. "I'm sorry I fell in love with you," she muttered indignantly.

Aging

December 16 is the last day I am considered, semantically, as a child. That is also the day I turn in my cap and gown order. Another coincidence.

I remember my first day sophomore year. We started at 10. My mom drove Joey, Ryan, and me to high school. That morning, Joey and I went to get coffee at Speedway. When I came home I couldn't stand the thought of three more years.

Three years later, I can't stand the thought of leaving. Making new friends. Starting something new. I'm disappointed that there is so much I didn't do, and there will never be a chance for me to make it up.

50 Books Project

I will preface this by noting that all of these books are books I have read, dropped, or should have read a long, long time ago...

1. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
2. The Witch of Portobello (Paulo Coelho)
3. The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien)
4. My Side of the Mountain (Jean Craighead George)
5. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
6. The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)
7. My Name Is Asher Lev (Chaim Potok)
8. Finnegan's Wake (James Joyce)
9. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
10. Dead Souls (Nikolai Gogol)
11. The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
12. The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud)
13. Ishmael (Daniel Quinn)
14. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
15. The Iliad (Homer)
16. As You Like It (William Shakespeare)
17. Breakfast at Tiffany's (Truman Capote)
18. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
19. Moral Disorder (Margaret Atwood)
20. Anne of Green Gables (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
21. Candide (Voltaire)
22. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
23. Ulysses (James Joyce)
24. A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
25. Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
26. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
27. Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey)
29. Silent Spring (Rachel Carson)
30. Utopia (Sir Thomas Moore)
31. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Lewis Carroll)
32. The Pickwick Papers (Charles Dickens)
33. House of Leaves (Mark Danielewski)
34. The Rose and the Beast (Francesca Lia Block)
35. Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx)
36. No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories (Miranda July)
37. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo)
38. House of Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
39. A Mercy (Toni Morrison)
40. Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman)
41. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
42. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint Exupery)
43. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
44. The Tao of Pooh (Benjamin Hoff)
45. Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk)
46. A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)
47. A Spy in the House of Love (Anais Nin)
48. Madame Bovary (Gustav Flaubert)
49. Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak)
50. Little Children: A Novel (Tom Perrotta)

Pray, pray, pray for a snow day

It's late and I should sleep. I have too much to get done. Composition portfolio due Dec. 15, finish Christmas shopping, call my sponsor family, shop for sponsor girl with Marver-Lize (the appropriate last name of my beloved English teacher who is way too cool to take the last name of her husband no matter how nice he is), wrap Christmas gifts, decorate, go to work to be able to afford gas and Christmas presents, buy new boots (or any boots since I have none), find my warm winter coat, study math since I fail miserably at it, poke at my dead cat for awhile to see if I can actually learn what is called what (what's the point of the dissection anyway? we just look at muscles and name them. what a waste), look for a new job since $6 an hour does NOT suffice, apply to college (oh yeah, that), brainstorm and do layout for January Smoke Signals issue, Christmas decorating...

And oh, I'm nothing I ever wanted to be. Right now is the opportune moment to divulge the ultimate secret: I would rather be beautiful and ignorant. Reasoning (as warped and twisted as it comes): I know I'm intelligent. The problem with intelligence is that no one can be the smartest or greatest. There is always someone else to be overshadowed by (passive voice). I love to write, but there are a million other people who write better than I do. Who's ideas are more original than mine. I am nothing by comparison. Same goes for every other subject I seemingly excel in that isn't beauty related. There is always someone better. I hate that. It makes everything I do seem futile. But beauty on the other hand, is simple. A pretty face is a pretty face is a pretty face. Are there people who are an exemplary beautiful person? Yes, of course. But as for the general population of beautiful people, they are beautiful in similar ways. Beauty fades, but by that time she's married and popped out a few kids and goes to the same job every day: beauty is obsolete anyway. But for now, for me, being intelligent enough to know I'm not intelligent enough drives me to the brink of cliche. Though this is all hypothetical and in no way supported by any kind of study or science, and truthfully, since this is hypothetical, I would rather have all the mind in the world that have eyelashes that go on for days. Besides, if I were that intelligent, I would probably end up just buying beauty if I really wanted it. That's the beauty of it all. Store bought attractiveness supplied to ugly smart people. Not to say all smart people are ugly or that I think I'm ugly. Rambling aside, my point has been made across.

Just Enough Stress to Function

I adjourn my November with the fall play. There's nothing like high school theatre to ruin the arts. In any event, I feel as though I did well. It was an awarding experience and the perfect way to end my senior year. Ironically, now is the time I get involved while I sufficiently avoided any kind of social interaction in my preceding high school years. A review of high school soon to follow...

Yesterday I received a letter from my former psychiatrist. He hasn't heard from me in 3 months and is therefore discharging me from his care. What care? That man was a pompous douche only made to seem intelligent by his suede chair and medical degree.

I only got one A on my report card. I almost cried.

I don't want to go to college. Actually, I don't want to go to the colleges I actually can go to. I want to study environmental toxicology at the University of California - Davis; physiological science at Marquette; political science at UW - Madison and so much more. I love learning. I would prefer a college that focused on that. I suck at socializing.

Summer Movie Time

It's really been about Doris Day