| less narcissistic |
[17 Apr 2007|10:50am] |
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i have overridden my egocentric background of pictures of me looking hot with a picture of an adorable rabbit in an attempt to look less narcissistic.
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| talking trash under my window |
[05 Mar 2007|12:57am] |
professor mitch clearfield:
i don't know what you want me to write. i don't want to write what you want me to write. i want to write,
"the book is beautiful. you could put all the words in the book in a glass of water. the book is about racism. the author of the book understands racism and i never will. the words in the book are holy."
but mitch clearfield would not accept that as a proper essay. he wants me to write about something else. he wants me to examine theatrics in the book. so that is what i will do. but where is my focus? it is one oh eight. my focus is still not there.
i am listening to margot and the nuclear so and sos as a guilty pleasure because the one song has chicago in it and that's not even the one i'm listening to because i don't have any of my music here. my computer is broken. i guess it is good that it is broken. i am growing so tired.
i wish i got drunk. i wish i snorted cocaine like all the pretty and skinny girls. i wish i could write novels like richard rodriguez. i like my hair. i don't like when i get obsessed with boys who live in illinois. i don't like when i get obsessed with anything. is it nice to get obsessed with things? is it true that we live only for our obsessions? once jessica and i were obsessed with ben folds. it was fun. jessica liked to go on the message boards and everyone on the message boards was obsessed with her. and i think that she liked that. i would have liked it.
i like to smell books and to read them. i don't like to analyze them. i like for someone to analyze them for me. i like for the little small parts to be pointed out to me again and again. i like to watch film adaptations of books. i have lost one of my netflix movies. that makes me glum.
everyone in my life is worth loving intensely and fully. i love you intensely and fully, loraine. i have named the collection of people in my heart loraine. i did that today in the music building because it rhymed with something i needed to rhyme and i wanted to make a musical decalartion to the collection of people in my heart. but actually i scrapped that song anyway.
what do you want from me mitch clearfield?
kim is coming on sunday and we are going to get tattoos. grant has soft skin. i always call my sister when she is asleep. i can't take much in life seriously.
don't you think so much is too serious?
i do too, loraine.
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| hide your hearts girls |
[19 Feb 2007|08:51pm] |
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reading the dirty classified ads in the skanky weekly tabs; cracking bones; those reality television shows with gay people on them that want to be fashion designers or models or room decorators where people get eliminated and cry; lists of pleasing words; the really long menthol cigarettes; when people leave wildly silly notes in books you buy at the used bookstore or you check out at the library; letters that you send in the mail; parasols; when genuinely nice people say genuinely mean things about other people you genuinely despise ("regina is rather fat and i hate the way she wheezes in class"); using the luxurious and expensive hair and bath products in other peoples' showers whe you really need a shower and they say you can use theirs; portland; skinny girls in skinny jeans with lots of gold necklaces.
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| departed, have left no address |
[17 Feb 2007|10:02am] |
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there is a huffy woman who wants to have me fired as the editor of the paper and she will probably succeed because she is higher-up than i am and she is threatening a lot of higher-up-type people and i am expendable. driving back to portland again yesterday we blew out another tire at mile 154. it was five minutes past the time the tire places all closed. we stopped at the taco time in the dalles where i just happened to see mac's parents.
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| i never loved you. you are deluded. |
[15 Feb 2007|07:36pm] |
last night grant and i thought to drive to portland at 2.30 p.m. just for the evening to eat at the paradox cafe and to see the city lights and to go to the camera obscura concert and that is what we did. i dropped all the cigarette sleeves in the back of the car and some of them got crushed. on the way home at midnight in the pouring rain somewhere between portland and hood river the brand new tire on the old old car picked up a screw in the road and heated up and caught fire. there were no lights anywhere and we had to shine this little lizard flashlight grant's mom gave to me to attach to my keys over thanksgiving. we were terrified the light would go out, and we couldn't loosen the lugnuts and we were all out of cigarettes of course except for one very long virginia slim so we called triple-a and the guy couldn't find us of course and then when he did he had trouble putting on the spare too. i said to grant, How important is your ten o'clock class tomorrow on a scale from one to ten and he said nine point five, but it was too dangerous to drive from mile twenty to mile three-hundred on that practically-shredded little spare so we drove to hood river to get a motel. there were no motel rooms in hood river because everyone had gone to bed. we went to the dalles where no one could give us accurate directions to the nearest tire place and we stayed at a motel six and there were no smoking rooms left so we just slept naked on that tiny flat mattress watching growing pains. that was at four in the morning and we woke at seven to drive all the way back home. at the gas station, i said the snarkiest things to the man with the gas pump because he thought he was funny and nothing was funny anymore because we were both so tired. grant slept on the ride home and in sixties literature at one o'clock i could barely keep my head up to hear malcolm x talk about black power.
but well camera obscura was rather cute and everyone in the audience kept tossing about an orange balloon and someone kept on farting near us but no one let on. at the end these girls who were younger but wore dresses like laura's dresses stood behind us and i thought of slipping her name into their big knit bags because then i think they would have googled her and there would have been an adventure, but i didn't do it. i liked the lead singer's scottish accent and i liked how she said, "be careful, you might get an arm ache."
last week i was so lonely i thought that my insides were going to be eaten up by it, so i went to buy a feeder mouse at the pet shop. but when i got there i saw the parakeets all cooped up in the tiny cages and it made me depressed and also i remembered how much i loved birds so i bought a teal-and-yellow one and he is called gabriel garcia marquez. i spent over one hundred dollars building him an aviary in what used to be our storage room with lots of millet and bit ferny plants and windows to look out of an perches and all of that, but he seemed so glum and he would never sing so i went to the pet store two days later and bought another parakeet, this time a yellow one, and she is called virginia woolf. sally hughes told me that was an awful name for a parakeet because i was just wishing suicide upon her, to which i scoffed and said, "maybe so, but also terrible genius. and an undeniable influence over our miserable marquez." so far virginia has been very sassy and hasn't tried to drown herself in the bird bath and now gabriel sings all the time and they are always cuddling and fluffing their feathers so i don't see the problem. alex frank said it was pretentious for us to name our birds after authors, but i think it is pretentious to name pets at all and surely they have their own names that they call each other and i like authors a great deal and i think people should really stop being quite so judgmental.
but nevertheless the loneliness is still there, especially because gabriel garcia marquez and virginia woolf have each other and they are still rather terrified of me so our friendship is really one-sided. there are no friends here at whitman and there is no time to have them even if there were friends. i am shattered by the reality of college as a place where people drink and drink and study whatever they need to study to get a degree and complain about studying and then drink after complaining about it and never laugh and never have any adventures at all. i am very bored with myself, too. i think my hair is quite dull lately and i have gotten fat again and i'm always getting black ink from newspapers all over my fingers and i have little patience for anything. i am attracted to people who i know are vain just by looking at them. i think that's because i'm extremely vain and i admire surface qualities in people such as the ability to pick out a flattering outfit, thinness, and a certain expression that signifies that they know that most of it is all bullshit but they're going to play along innocently as though they don't know it at all.
let me please cease pretending. i am utterly miserable, but i don't want admit that to myself or to others because it is so predictable and it feels like a complete digression from the perfect stasis i found last semester underneath the big sycamore trees with the green parrots and more green parrots and from time to time a cardinal.
i am bored and empty and lonely and it feels rather worthless to enunciate it, but it feels even more worthless to keep working toward the empty, lonely goals that are really only shadows.
i am going to move into a tiny apartment in a small town (such as mosier) and i am going to eat out every day off the inheritance money i am going to receive from some relative i never really met but who was disgustingly, disgustingly rich. i am going to have a bigger aviary there are there will be windows in it and dozens of birds and trees too and i'll had a small dog and i'll always make lentils for dinner with curry and brown rice and i'll write music on unexpected instruments and be a ghost-writer for ann m. martin. then i will wonder how my head ever got so cluttered up as it is now, and i will think this blandly serious little period in my life to be extremely silly, and i will laugh about it over tea while chatting with my dog. who i will name after a talented author.
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| sharp-tailed grouse |
[05 Feb 2007|11:09pm] |
it feels like you were never a part of my life at all and that you are a distant person in a photograph who i have really never met, but have only ever glimpsed, and that is all you are to me. i see you've grown a moustache. i know you've forgotten it more than i have.
how does life move like that?
today i saw a belted kingfisher. it was much larger than i expected a belted kingfisher might be.
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| electro-sound |
[31 Jan 2007|08:08pm] |
all the time when people are talking they say little things that would be the very nice middle to a very nice poem. here are some: "you are my driveway." "his pacifism is so polite." "i am lately obsessed with flossing."
i am lately obsessed with flossing. it's all those mouthwash commercials that zoom in between your teeth and you see all the little micro-organisms that are flocking there. they're very troubling. i know those little guys are hanging out between my teeth. frankly, i don't care for their company.
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| lambert's law of emission |
[09 Jan 2007|05:27am] |
i wanted to write a list of secrets that i had, because i'm feeling particularly unguarded (but simultaneously vulnerable, somehow). then i realized i really didn't have any, except that i fall asleep with the television on and that i look up things from new york times front page articles on wikipedia when i don't understand them. how did i get so dramatically dull?
i woke up and grant was lying on the floor under the pink comforter. it was only four in the morning but i couldn't get back to sleep. maybe because i wanted to know why he'd left in the middle of the night. seriously, god knows the last time i vacuumed that floor. sick.
now i'm just waiting for the sun to rise. now it's five thirty and there are certainly joggers at the track and there are certainly cross-town commuters drinking coffee. nothing terrifies me more than the thought that i might be the only person awake in the world. that's why i watch the home shopping network when i can't sleep.
i couldn't think of a new years resolution. maybe it's all slowed down. i feel most in love in the quiet dark when it's warm. in those moments, i feel like i should say something profound. it's difficult to think of anything to say like that when you are put on the spot. it's really a task. last night, when i had the chance, i refused to give into the game. instead, i contemplated the shapes of shoulders.
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| and i am watching your chest rise and fall |
[06 Dec 2006|10:39pm] |
dear life.
you suck sometimes. sometimes you really blow curds.
but i hold onto you anyway because i feel like it's the responsible thing to do. i feed you. i rent movies for you off of netflix. i bathe you and give you tons and tons of sex. what more do you want?
why can't you just treat me nice? buy me some flowers... fix me a pot of green tea... do a little bit of seducing...
sometimes, life, you just forget how to be sexy. please listen to justin timberlake's latest record and get a clue.
love,
sophie
p.s. i like the part where he talks about slaves and whips and shit like that. i'm into that nasty bondage stuff, life, so keep that in mind.
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| as far away from this town as we can |
[29 Nov 2006|03:09pm] |
today is a great day to lie in bed and watch documentaries concerning the hypocrisy and repugnance of the far right, and drink tea, and eat popcorn right from the bag.
but you probably can't do that because you are probably busy writing papers. HA HA HAAA AHAA AHA HA AHAHA. i am DONE with my big project. ha ha hhahahha.
excuse me while i pick between "control room;" "the bush family fortune;" or the underdog, an intimate portrait of howard zinn.
red rose tea with agave. newman's own with extra melted margarine (you couldn't count the trans fat if you tried) and salt. the rain pouring outside. HA AHHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAH!
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| a bad week for nancy pelosi but... |
[20 Nov 2006|07:32pm] |
a worse week for robert and angela stokes and their three children, after a greyhound bus traveling on an interstate highway in ohio suddenly released the contents of its toilet, and they poured through the open sunroof of the ford explorere next to it. the stokes were drenched in a mixture of urine, feces, and toilet paper.
-- the week.
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| i babysit britney spears' children |
[20 Nov 2006|02:06pm] |
i deserve reconstructive surgery. all those noobs that get it only get it because they have plates and plates of money. i give my money to charities. therefore, i deserve it.
and i would get myself reconstructed to look like sienna miller. she's fucking skinny. and i like that. i like people who look like hangers. clothes look great on them.
i wonder if it's legal to have your body reconstructed to directly parrot the body of a cocaine addict's.
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| i don't like fat people or ugly people |
[12 Nov 2006|08:56pm] |
seriously. WHY are there so many fat lesbians? okay, so last night i went to this play in the gay neighborhood in chicago (which is a cool place with many fashionable men and many, many places where you may go to shop if you wish to dress in drag), but the audience was just disgusting. there were about one million fat lesbians. i don't mean, like, chubby lesbians. i mean they were like five feet tall and i think they literally weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds a piece. WHY? they are by nature loud and gropy and it's vastly unpleasant. why can't lesbians just always be hot? gay guys often hot. lesbians are sometimes hot. i think all my friends who are lesbians are hot. but that's because i don't associate with fat or ugly people pretty much at all. i just think it's unfortunate. kim and i pretended we were dating so that people in the world knew that hot lesbians existed. because seriously, if you were sitting in that audience, you would think it was a requirement for lesbians to be fat, ugly, and seriously seriously annoying. they were super loud and looked like they would cry at the drop of a pin and laughed REALLY LOUD AND OBNOXIOUSLY when anyone said anything like, "cheeese!" or, "wart!" that was maybe funny in the seventh grade.
MAYBE.
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| a good week for dems, but... |
[10 Nov 2006|11:38am] |
a BETTER week for christians, after a florida man was ambushed and shot in the chest by two assailants as he took out the trash. the bullet was stopped by the two small bibles he was carrying in his pocket.
-- the week.
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| teenage jesus superstar |
[21 Jul 2006|07:06pm] |
if i could fuck anybody in the world, it would be stephen hawking.
because i like a motherfucking challenge.
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| they don't laugh at jokes; they laugh at tragedies |
[11 Jul 2006|06:39pm] |
well, it's that wintry summer right now. with all the clouds, you know. jessica and i tried to go to sauvie's island this morning when we thought it would be beautiful and blue, but the clouds just moved in and in and we left feeling tired. i am in that mood where i am completely FULL. i just want to write and dance and paint. it's not a happiness... just a surplus of sorts.
here is a picture of eli... we have spent now perhaps seven hours together this summer:
it's really funny... i never thought we would be friends again for the rest of time... and one day it just clicks and we are suddenly great again. who knows... .( here's what i wrote about him just two years agoCollapse ).
there's this perfect lyric to a patty griffin song that says, "i don't know nothing except change will come. year after year what we do is undone. time keeps moving from a crawl to a run... i wonder if i'm gonna ever get home." the thing that puzzles me so frequently is the definition of "home." i guess it's rather boring of me to struggle with such a thing, but there it is.
when vince and i talk everything is measured in long long breaths of story and silences. i said, "when will you write all this down?" and he said, "for what?" and i didn't really know the answer right then. but now i guess the answer is just because you can. to make a map. and when you forget, there will be a place to point to and remember. maybe that's very empty, but it's difficult to tell, isn't it? so vince said these little strawberry-candy things: "what i love about him is that he is allegedly this tyrant, but i've never seen him! i want it to stay that way. no one ever sees him, but when he is in town there's this ominous cloud over the construction site. it's amazing."; "preston said that he once spent a summer selling caramel apples at carnivals with these two women. he went from chicago (sic) to mexico following state fairs and things. i just thought that would be such a life." i am afraid i might be exploiting vince by poorly documenting the things he said. so i'll stop.
i like to play a game with my camera called "motivation" where i give people motivations and then photograph them. i usually forget the motivation when i look up the photo, though. shame. laura and ruby and i went to gustav's. there was diarrhea mustard and a waiter named johan that we flirted with (ruby and laura were experienced with him) and left him a magic pile of bits with the tip (cigarette, condom, trident gum, wunderland tickets, business card for ace of hearts swinger's joint). oh, some men are so lucky.
mostly the summer is unwinding nicely. i have had approximately nineteen bags of popsicles (the trashy kind with a million sugar and two sticks) all for myself; gone lap swimming two times (saw my high school biology teacher -- how odd to not write "professor"..); spent afternoons in custer park; obsessed over the world series of pop culture (go pdx503!); baked, eaten, slept, painted. this is the calm before the storm. but it's good to know that.
[jessica is the sculptor. she has sculpted both the statue of david and of derek. brandon is the wife of the sculptor, angry at the sculptor of not paying enough attention to him. he secretly has a gun. i think grant is cop. i have no idea about ben. but isn't ben great?]
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| i'll write the song that you sing for me baby |
[03 Jul 2006|11:00am] |
they are addicted to guitar freakz. it's all they do. it's a lost cause, really.
i have not been ignoring your phone calls. i've flung myself into a vacuum. in it i have only been reading gabriel garcia marquez, eating pie, and wishing i was with you. but i'm too afraid to do anything about it.
there's a jets to brazil song that i associate with a boy i have never met. his name is jesse.
i sleep less and less, but my painting is improving. i wish you were here. it's all so very lush.
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| tell me what i look like when i stumble |
[27 Jun 2006|10:16am] |
day one.
we started early in portland and drove south. pulled off in eugene where we went to the restaurant laura showed me by the train tracks. everyone at the restaurant looks like they should have "peacelovekindnesscompassion" tattooed on their lower backs. some of them probably did. the coffee was bad and dusty. they served jam in bottles you could squeeze.
it was a long drive. we listened to: built to spill, the essex green, the pixies, more. stopped at a town called "weed" where we got our picture taken. it was suddenly hot when we got to weed. the chocolate in the trunk of the car started to melt. the scenery went like this: trees trees mountain desert desert hot hot hot shrubs hot desert. jessica and i sat in the back seat and touched our toes together and made puns about toes. ("do you want to go to a movie?" "toe-tally." "what's your favorite gemstone?" "toe-paz." etc.) we drove over shasta lake and tried to find a place to camp. everything was so parched and dry and yellow around us that we weren't allowed to build a fire. the first place we looked had the most oily disgusting fat people ever staying nearby, and so i rejected it. i am full of hatred for the hideously ugly. instead we found an out-of-the-way spot with nine sites where we could stay. we went swimming in this bit of the lake:
the ground of the lake felt really soft and unsettling, and there were tiny dead moths all over the surface. the swallows would swoop in and eat them off! jessica and ben and i fought with water. we dueled. jessica won the duel, ultimately. then jessica and i climbed over all this brush and hiked for a few miles along a highway that overlooked the lake. every few seconds we were required to stop and be spellbound. we held hands and talked about boys and boys and sometimes family. for dinner we had bread and cheese and tofurky and lettuce. i didn't eat the cheese. we didn't have a cooler and we were afraid the cheese would rot, so we tried to eat it all. jessica took a bite that was THIS BIG!:
i saw six shooting stars lying on the picnic table that night.
day two.
drove through farms and thickets of redwing blackbirds to nevada city to see ariana rampy. she lives in a house in the shade. the sun just kept creeping closer and closer to us, and soon it was one hundred and seven degrees. ari and teddie showed us downtown nevada city. katie said she wanted to raise her children there. there were rows and rows of westerny shops and old buildings and scenesters and hippies everywhere, and even someone's door was painted with an orangutan's face!
we exhuasted ourselves with southern vegan food and heat and shops selling shells and jars of perfume. collapsed on the floor of aris' house and napped for hours with the fan humming over us. then we woke up and all drove to the river where a man had drowned just the other day and climbed into it. katie and ben laughed and held hands and ari and jessica sat on a rock near me and discussed the merits of rivers. there were hundreds of birds' nests on that bridges and they looked like little charred up pieces of paper falling out of the sky.
we made spaghetti with thick sauce and ate it in the dark on the porch. ari has the kind of parents that everyone must tell her over and over again are so great. drove out to the library where these old men had set up gigantic telescopes to look at globular clusters and such things. ben and katie and jessica sat up in the hill and listened to the frogs that sounded like bears. ari and i indulged in a long conversation on the baseball bleachers. jessica peed.
i slept on a big couch next to jessic and she was the last thing i saw before i fell asleep.
day three.
went to a farmer's market in grass valley with ari. she bought bread and three baskets of strawberries. i bought some marionberries that we all ate for breakfast with rosemary bread. all the old women were selling stalks of lavender.
drove to berkeley, which showed the hardest traffic we hit for the whole trip. it was kind of shocking because we had just been cruising through the middle of nowhere for two days, so all of those cars seemed out of place. then we didn't know where we were meant to go because berkeley is a big place and it is full of things. we started at the marina where five people were doing tai chi and every campfire pit was occupied by a different huge and diverse family. there was music and food everywhere. it was cold again.
someone found university ave and the berkeley campus. i remembered when my mother took me and pointed to trees that had meant something to her when she went there. jessica and katie climbed in this one:
ben asked the man at the bookstore how to get to haight ashbury and he said that was in san francisco, but we should go to telegraph ave which was only a few blocks that way. so we went a few blocks that way and there were all the people! we looked at vintage clothes and records, mostly. the record store was like city. i could tell that ben wanted to move into it and live on the top floor. jessica bought the last regina spektor album they had. at this point, ben would want me to tell you what records he bought, but i can't remember. fugazi and something else. he'll probably comment and say.
went into san francisco. the golden gate bridge looked silver! katie's phone ran out of batteries and we charged them up under a table at a mexican restaurant at haight ashbury. it was starting to get dark. i bought a cigarette case for grant in a store where a woman was watching a movie that she finished just before we paid. she said it was a good movie and a good way to pass the time. went to a bookstore and katie and i discussed how much we loved books. that made me smile.
i got to drive and we drove through the dark trying to find a camp site. i saw a skunk crossing the road. eventually we decided we should just pay for a motel, but they were all no vacancies. we got the last room in the trashiest one in a town that starts with a u. it was a smoking room and it smelled awful and the heater was on all night which was hot hot already. this was one of the best parts of the entire trip.
read only a few pages in proust before i passed out.
day four.
a long haul day. we had to drive three hundred miles to the northern californian coast and a camp site grant had said was fantastic called jedidiah smith park. the redwoods were the most pleasant to drive through. there were deer and also elk. there was also a surplus of tourist traps. we only went to the first one -- five dollars to experience the wonder of the "drive-thru tree!" it was actually a very tiny hole. we were afraid the car with the roofrack wouldn't fit. ben said he was prepared to take the roofrack off (katie fell in love with him again, and can you blame her?) but it all worked out. truly, driving through a tree is not as wondrous as you might believe. the gift shop was whale-like in size.
the camp site WAS worth it. it was full of trees (when jessica's partner derek is asked what sort of things he is interested in, he says, "i really like trees." this is charming), and there was a river you could swim in full of fish and rocks to climb up and tadpoles you could catch in your palms. the air was cool and we could build a fire so we did the popcorn and the hot dogs and marshmallows (which had melted). jessica and i wandered down to a rocky beach and talked for hours and hours about everything there was to talk about. ben and katie talked about death and other things. katie and i chatted about religion. everything was at peace.
we were not mauled by bears of any sort.
day five.
the drive home was long and tiring and it was all repeat scenery so i got cranky. everyone else was pleasant.
i have avoided mentioning that the tally of poop jokes made over this trip was above and beyond any tally made by any person in any time period ever. for some reason we found everything having to do with poops so hysterical that we couldn't stop talking about them. all i can say is that i'm lucky to have gone with three people with whom this could have been so.
i'm exhausted and questioning the meaning of life. ah, the fruits of a successful road trip.
fin.
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likemustard
