Riding home on the train, I was overcome with a compelling urge to write an entry consisting of one long paragraph. So long, in fact, that nobody would probably read it. Because a long string of unbroken text is, for whatever reason, intimidating to the eye. Mine too! Look at it all! Isn't it distressing? I was not deliberately trying to intimidate anybody but I thought I would do something different. My idea was, I would sit down and type type type and see what emerged from the recesses of my brain. (And here is where a paragraph break would normally go. I enjoy paragraph breaks, as a general rule. My little sister does not. I love her. I have to quote her latest entry: "what can I say, life is too fucking short to partake in immature drama.. live and let go is my new motto. If they don't respect you- move on.. if they don't treat you well- move the fuck along...if they play games, make retarded demands, threaten you, argue over nothing, blame you for everything, and never show you appreciation, will you, for the love of god, move the fuck ALONG." It's like found poetry, no? I love my sister and her crazy Livejournal.) This urge might have sprung in part from the fact that I am writing again. Foo and I are doing this "niners" thing, which was our excuse to force each other to write things. I have thus far written eleven or twelve poems, by far the most I have written in a Good Long While. Today I printed out the eight ones that didn't utterly suck, and began revising them. I revised them! One or two, I might even love! A few of them are narrative prose poems, which seem to come easily even when nothing else does. One was a cop-out Googlism poem. A couple are short and spare. It feels fantastic to be scribbling and revising poems once more. Anyway so I wrote an entry yesterday or the day before (or maybe both) and I didn't post it because [deleted]. (Sort of like I'm doing now. Hmm. Note to self: delete previous.) But other information, I am willing to pass on. For instance, I had lunch with La Wade today at Café Bastille, a delightful little French spot that's near my work. Other places I've eaten recently include: Walzwerk. This was my first foray into German cuisine; I never knew sauerkraut could taste good. Since I have moved to San Francisco I have tried for the first time the following foods: German, Afghani, Indonesian, Belgian (I am so cheating with this one, but we did go to Frjtes before the opera), Brazilian, Mediterranean and possibly more that I am forgetting. For instance, I never ate sushi before I moved here, or Indian either. Speaking of the opera, it was Russian and contained plenty of good old fashioned Russian suffering. It was Shastakovich whose name I have heard before come to think of it, and the opera was "Lady Macbeth of Mtensk" and I probably slaughtered the spellings of both of those and I apologize, because Shostokovich probably deserves better. Ask Wade about it; she knows Russian. She is a sexy Russian-knowing, marathon-running scientist. I secretly suspect that she's a superhero or spy of some type. Anyway it has been a fun week so far. Tomorrow I am going to Cirque du Soleil and then on Friday is Books & Pie and then on Saturday I have a thing. Chock full o' nuts, that's my social calendar. (Not to imply that my friends are nuts. Actually some of them are slightly nuts, but then so am I, so...) You know what I need to tell you before I forget? Two things. Firstly, if you e-mail me (and I wish you would, because I have a lot of time on my hands at work sometimes) you should put your subject line in [brackets] so it will catch my attention. I get hundreds of spams and no real mail. The occasional real mail possibly gets deleted, and I do not like that. Secondly, I wish my friend Dan would start a photo blog. I think I can safely say he is the most talented photographer of my acquaintance. Go check it out; I think I like the balloon photo best. But then again, balloons are my favorite! Speaking of Friend Dan, I might be seeing him on Thanksgiving weekend. There is a big party in L.A. and I was toying with the idea of going down there. Waldemar invited me (it is, among other things, his birthday party) and I haven't seen him in a really long time. Do I have a not-so-secret desire to see someone I hooked up with a year ago and haven't seen since then and be almost fifty pounds lighter? Why yes. Yes I do have that desire. Even though he thought I was sexy back in the day as well, it would be fun to spring it on him. I owe it to my inner fat girl, who is secretly convinced she is starring in some crappy 80s makeover movie. Oh man, speaking of back in the day, I had an interesting IM conversation with Matt the other night. We were talking about if we could be friends and so forth and he said straight up that he didn't think we'd be friends In Real Life because our groups of friends were so different. He said his friends were not literary enough or something. I was thinking about it afterwards because my impulse was to say that sure we could be friends. But thinking back, did we really have a lot in common? And I'm not talking literaryness-- I mean sure, I have friends who do a mean Little Golden Book explication, but I also have friends who have other interests or don't read much and they are fabulous people. But Matt and I never had a whole lot in common to begin with. We had fun together and we had sexual chemistry, but we were always on different wavelengths, I think. And that's not saying my friends are smarter than his friends (because why do our friends even enter into the equation?) but when it boils down to Matt and to me, I don't think we have a whole lot to talk about. Which is quite frankly sad, but possibly part of the reason I don't really regret our breakup. I don't think we would have made it over the long run. I know you can't quantify love, but.... just "but" I guess. I can't muse on love at the moment, because [deleted]. Did you know my bathroom is flooded? Well it is, and so is my hallway. They smell like mildew. Wade told me that toxic mold might grow and then creep into my bedroom, attack me in my sleep and kill me. Except the part about the attacking in my sleep, but she definitely implied imminent death. I fear for my birds, because they are very tiny and I fear they could easily fall prey to toxic mold. Also on the train (to change the subject entirely once more) I was pondering how miraculous other people's writing is to me. Seemingly simple journal entries written in a personal style astonish me. I was thinking specifically of many of my friends, who write things that are not flashy or even supposed to be all write-y, but somehow are so wonderfully fun to read. And then I wondered if people feel that way about my writing. And then I thought (with, I'm afraid, a distinct shortfall of humility) that since I have a reasonably popular journal, they must! And then I began to be impressed with the miraculousness of my writing. Not that I write so much better than anyone, but that maybe I do write nearly as well as some of them. That's the beauty of the thing. Does this make sense? That I thought I was some kind of can't-write-journaling-hack? Because I did. It was a lovely thought, if only in my own head. I guess it goes back to the slogan I had written on my computer monitor for so long, which was: "Nobody else could have written this." It might not be great, the crap that comes out of my head, but at least that slogan is still true.
"Perhaps it's the homoerotic subtext between Frodo and Sam that does it. No, they aren't having sex, but my DVD player thinks it could happen at any moment. I know how it feels. Despite the fact that I've read the trilogy, I'm sort of hoping they'll at least make out in
The Two Towers."
Okay, that's creepy. Two years ago, I posted an entry in poem form, which was also a weird stream-of-consciousness thing.
what i'm reading:
Just adding to the booklist. Now, in addition to Pale Fire, Song of Solomon, and The Maltese Falcon, I finished The Way of All Flesh. I am working on a grand booklist update. It's 2/3 written, even!
what i'm writing:
Poems! That don't completely suck!
what i'm watching: Angel is on soon.
anything:
What if Michael Jackson is innocent?
the birds:
I think Buttercup is getting fat. Possibly because she NEVER FLIES. Poor Buttercup. FLY!
journal quote of the day:
"LT and I have this routine where we like to pretend that our futon is a sheltered Mormon futon, because some rather kinky stuff has taken place on top of it, particularly in 2002, and we make the futon exclaim about the horror and sin and shockingness of what just happened in its high-pitched Futon Voice. I should mention that we only make the futon talk after the kinkiness is all finished, because I don't want you to think that making furniture talk in puppet voices is part of sex for us or anything."
I would quote Mimi Smartypants' entire entry, if I could. You need to read this entry, people. Trust me.
mood ring:
weird
shakespeare says:
Pray you, without any more virginal fencing, will you use him kindly? He will line your apron with gold. (Pericles)
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