I am working on a presentation for tomorrow. Joey and I are giving a 40 minute presentation on Emerson and Dickinson and nature, called "This whole Experiment of Green" (a Dickinson line).

Each person who has given their presentation has been reading the lecture off of a piece of paper. Joey and I want to be a little more informal about it. So I'm writing up an outline and then I'm just going to wing it. I don't feel that I'm as prepared as I could be, since I haven't really done much research. And by "much" I mean "any." Fuck.

There's a reason I didn't do any research on our topic: I didn't really know what our topic was, except "Emerson" which doesn't exactly narrow it down. Joey was enthusiastic about it, and she offered to research it. When we got together to put together the presentation, all I did was sort of randomly pick up where she left off. So who the hell knows? I certainly don't.

Tomorrow also marks the one week countdown to my poetry reading, which makes me even more nervous than this presentation. (Although I don't plan on being drunk for the lecture tomorrow, and being drunk has always been on the agenda for the reading.) I haven't yet done a practice run to time myself; I need to do that. I also may rearrange the order somewhat, and throw in a couple of brand new pieces.

Amidst all the nerves and homework and classes and crap, I'm thrilled to be back at school after spring break. I really needed the break, but a week was enough for me. I don't know how the hell I'm going to function this summer, not having school for two months. I just love school. It's a sickness, really.

I saw Eleanor this weekend, and I also got to meet Sari. Man, did we ever have a good time.

What did we do? Huh. Can't really remember. It's all just a haze of girly love and giggles. I guess the writer/observer portion of my brain was taking a vacation day. Oh, we had ice cream in Sausalito. And we ate lunch. And Eleanor sang for us. And we drove around. And we laughed. And we drank. And we ate some more.

We went to a bar where you can play board games, and we decided to play Trivial Pursuit. Well by the time we had reached question number two, we decided that it was too hard, so we were going to cheat. We started throwing out questions that were too hard, giving big hints, and allowing each other to have multiple guesses at everything.

Finally, we just started rewording the questions. "Which country, where you can also get a tasty gyro, held the Afghanistan summit in 1863?" "For which war, involving Korean people, did Bill Fogermeister receive the Medal of Honor?" "Which baseball stadium, where the Astros play, and which is also shaped like a dome, was called the eighth wonder of the world?"

Despite our rampant cheating, we still played until we each had all our wedgies. I'm not going to tell you who answered the question, "Who shot J.R.?" with, "Lee Harvey Oswald." But suffice it to say, it was a damn funny game.

Procrastination or no, I think I have journal writer's block today. I have started to write about a number of things: people who are pissing me off, Ecstasy, lesbian sex. But the censor in my head hasn't let me get too far on any of these subjects.

Today, I wrote a poem which had Animal from the Muppet Show "ass fucking in the full moon," to give you a clue about where my mind is at right now. Maybe I'm just in a frame of mind where I have to say really outrageous shit, or nothing at all. Maybe next time I can be oblique enough not to incriminate myself.

In the meantime, here's a poem that I wrote this weekend. It's dedicated to Eleanor and her friend Curt, who inspired it.

Scene: 2 Women at the Lexington

You love the way
the sleeves of her sweater
are too long, and stretched out
like she's hiding her fists from the world.
You want to say something to her,
but walking to the other end of the bar
and introducing yourself
is totally beyond you.
You love the way she crunches on the ice
after she's drained her glass of scotch.
and how she's not afraid to fuck up really great scotch
with ice cubes.
You want to feel one of her curls
between your fingers, just one.
You love the way she holds a cigarette without inhaling.
The way she lets it burn.
You know that if you never walk to the other end of the bar
and say something, you will regret it forever.
She's halfway between a redhead and a blonde
halfway between fat and thin
halfway between you and the bathroom.
You get up
and walk that way, towards the bathroom,
and pause next to her.
I want to go down on you, you say,
like the sun on a mountain.
She looks at you
and puts out her cigarette in the bottom of her glass.
That's quite a line, she says.
And she smiles.

"Incidentally, we were right across the street from where Tim works. Every day, that bastard gets to go to work on the beach. He’s a bastard, I tell you. A bastard. "