the diary of antoine roquentin

I can’t believe I’m leaving tomorrow.

I’m so exhausted, physically and emotionally.

Too tired to blog the baggage.

Might as well get the sleep over with.

I’m totally eating sushi tomorrow night.

And guess what! Cool thing #4 about Brian: he likes sushi.

Categories: Ennui

I am absolutely in love with my free time. I’m going to read a novel a day to celebrate. Not really, but it sound like a wonderful thing to do. I felt like a king when I finished Snow Crash today. I think before I do the post about Sunday I should talk about Friday, which was actually incredibly fun. God, I am SOOOO behind in my blog posts. Kevin just call me and want to hang out. I’m feeling sort of tired and I don’t want to spend money going to a restaurant. It’s really gross out so I don’t know what we’re going to end up doing. I would say that it’s better that sitting at home, but I will feel such a wonderful sense of accomplishment once I have done the last three digital tasks I need to do which are to:

1) write Joe an e-mail
2) blog about Friday and Sunday
3) blog about today

I guess I could’ve just incorporated number two and number three, but lists are just better when they are triads. I’m really hungry. I will make myself some food and then come over to Kevin’s house and try to get out of there before 2 o’clock in the morning, unless we find something cool to do. I feel this terrible feeling like I’m incredibly behind with my work, and it’s very odd to think that I have personal work and then work that I get paid for. It just makes me feel like nothing is fun, it’s all just work. But if its Web design or writing, I enjoy those things, so that makes absolutely nothing that I do work. Hm…I’m confused. Time for a meal.

Categories: Ennui

OK, it’s official: my voice-recognition headset is dead. The microphone works wonderfully, but I can’t listen to music with it on any more, there is a short in the cable or something. And let’s face it, blogging in silence is so passe. Earlier I was getting it to work by jiggling the cord, but it’s now way past that stage. It now takes at least two or three minutes of jiggling to get any sound out of it at all. So I bought myself a Christmas present! Unfortunately, I won’t get it until next week… but I did get an incredible deal on it. An $80 headset for 45 bucks. I can live with the delay. Brian called me yesterday and we chatted for a bit. He doesn’t have a phone, so he could easily shut me out, but we have oddly stayed in very good contact even though he lives 80 miles away. Is that how far Arcata is? I can’t remember. Next time I go down, he wants me to come by myself. I will, but it will definitely be strange. Without Kevin, my safety blanket will be gone. I will be solely responsible for all conversation. I am so un-gregarious, it’s not even funny. But I am not weirded out at all by going down there. Kevin’s friend (and soon to be my friend) Panda, lives like two blocks away from Brian’s house. Even if he did want to feast on my entrails, I could totally outrun him to Panda’s house.

With all this work Christmas has snuck up on me. I am going to be in Sacramento on Friday. Not Friday, Thursday even. Well, if Tom will let me…which he will. I think. He came in late today, and I absolutely had to get some DDR in to celebrate the end of the evil job, so I didn’t get to ask him. Oh! Guess what! I get benefits at my job now. All these months of doing extra work have finally paid off. They never intended to make me have enough hours to get benefits, but all that extra work just seemed to happen. And we are still incredibly short staffed.

I had this fantasy last weekend of moving down to Eureka and working at the Eureka Reporter and going to college at College of the Redwoods down there. I should subscribe to the Reporter. There’s no link on their website. Is it just a fantasy? I’m going to need to go somewhere after I finish my math. I shouldn’t talk about this. It’s just like me wanting to move to Sacramento when I was going out with Andrew. Although to me it does feel different. Arcata is a really cool place. I can just lose myself and Arcata Pizza and Deli and be absorbed in the crowds of smart, stylish people. Where I feel like Sacramento is just the endless suburban rectum of the world.

You won’t begrudge me my fantasies will you? Good. Onwards.

Last weekend was incredible. I should have stayed at home on Saturday and finished those Santa letters before I went and did anything, but I really wanted to go to the mall and see Brian (not necessarily in that order). So me and Kevin jumped in the car and got the hell out of Dodge. The drive down wasn’t too bad, but I was in one of those holes where I can get any cellular reception when Brian left me a message. He said he would call back later, so I changed my voice mail to say that I was on my way down. The day before I had loaded all sorts of music from Kevin’s computer onto my iPod and we were rocking out to Deep Dish and Tweaker. (Kevin says that Tweaker is a band that was started by the remaining members of Nine Inch Nails, and I can really see the similarities in a few songs that I listened to. Before we knew it, we were in the wonderful soggy land of Eureka/Arcata. We knew we were home again once we were in the tender bosom of the safety corridor. We still were obsessed with the safety corridor and how no nowhere else in the entire world was safe. Right now I could die instantly, but in the corridor I could live forever. lol.

(Brian just called me. Sweet.)

Once we hit the city limits the first stop was the mall. We didn’t really buy anything. Well, I bought one shirt. Oddly, it was the same sure that I was wearing but I wanted another one. It actually worked out quite well, because I ended up forgetting the old shirt at Brian’s house. I was on cloud nine at the mall (and basically the entire trip) because I had such a cute outfit going. There will be pictures. Later.

While we were exploring the depths of the mall, Kevin mentioned that they had a dance revolution machine at the arcade at the mall. I of course had to check this out. It was a dollar a play (the Cinemas is 50 cents), and if you made too many mistakes it would just stop your song and you would be done, where at the theater it will let you keep going even if your life bar runs out. It was a total rip off, and half the buttons on the machine were broken, but I had to play it nonetheless. It was actually quite fun, because it had the songs from all the mixes on it and I got to play some old favorites from when me and Joe used to have our own pads.

After the DDR marathon (I played 9 songs nonstop), me and Kevin boarded the Dariusmobile once again and plotted our course to Arcata for some food. Months before, I had looked in vain for Arcata Pizza and Deli with Samantha and Steve, but we’d never found it and I concluded that it had gone out of business. Kevin knew where it was, though. I had remembered it being only like one block off the plaza, but it turned out it was around five or six blocks away. As soon as we arrived, I felt like I had found my people. We ordered, then settled in at a corner table, nibbling away at our Super Slices while we absorbed the beautiful people. Conversation was strictly nonverbal, as we silently rated who we thought were the coolest people in the room. There were some raver posers eating there as we arrived, but soon they left and the world was good.

It was unseasonably warm that evening, and as we circled the plaza critiquing the window displays my cell phone started to beep. Panda had called Kevin back and left a message saying we should come over. We finished our circle of the shops, I queued up the Depeche Mode, and we jetted off to McKinleyville. We hadn’t gotten out of Arcata yet when my phone rang again. Brian was apparently at some party at this house that we had been at the last time we came down. He said we should drop by, and we wholeheartedly agreed. We were still sort of perplexed as to what sort of party it was, but we had to go check it out. About this time, we arrived at Panda’s abode. Kevin was still trying to get directions from her as we pulled up and noticed her in the front yard patiently giving directions. She gave us a warm welcome, and she invited us in. It was this incredibly nice house right off the main drag in McKinleyville. There were four or five roommates, but it wasn’t crowded at all.

We sat down on the couch where one of the roommates was playing the latest Resident Evil game. They were stuck on this one part where a monster would kill you right before you would be able to get out of this one area. While we hung out and watched the drama unfold on the screen, they discovered how to use CO2 tanks to freeze the monster for a short bit of time, but never succeeded in beating that part. We were all transfixed by the action, nonetheless. Kevin and Panda talked about old times, and we all talked about the old “homosexual clique” as I call it at the high school. All of its members are back in town for the holidays, which makes me triply glad to get the fuck out of here Thursday. They talked a lot about Jay, this one guy that went to high school with us. I was never friends with him, but he always seemed really cool. Like, one of those people that are so much cooler than you that you can’t even talk to them without feeling strange. And from what they said, he was cooler than I could have ever known. I hate people that are older than me, though. I also hate people that are more artistic than me. And thirdly I hate people my age that are smarter than me. I think he wins on all three counts there, but I might be giving him too much credit. The other two, Peng and Justin, I could deal without. But I really doubt I will see any of them, as I am absolutely sure Ben is going to monopolize Justin’s time, and with him all the others. I hope they die of AIDS. I guess that’s an incredibly mean thing to say, but I just consider it the scratch on the surface of my hatred of Justin. I don’t want to go into that saga, though. It would just bore me and you alike with the immature person I was.

After an hour or so, we decided we should probably get to the party before it was over. It was around 11 when we convinced the Pandaness and all her glory to accompany us on our foray. You might notice that I talk about her in such glowing terms, but it was one of those things where I went home, read her MySpace profile, and was like “you are my soulmate!” I’m just like that. I immediately either hate or love people, and this was definitely the latter.

It took us for ever to find that house again. A whole week had gone by, and the last time we were driving around these roads it wasn’t exactly like we were paying too much attention to where we were. We found our cafe again (the East Side Deli), and preceded past it to the party house. Before we even saw it, we knew we were in the right place due to the endless line of parked cars. We had to park four blocks away. Panda was actually voicing my fears about walking into a big house full of strange people, but I suggested that we should just curl up into a ball if things got crazy. The place was just as odd as it sounded. We knew nobody there, but there were so many people that no one gave us a second thought. Me and Panda hid behind Kevin. Or at least I know I did. Luckily, we met up with Brian after only a few minutes.

That last night we saw each other had been so late, I barely remembered anything about what he looked like. I was really scared that he was going to be some ugly drunken freakazoid and that I had come all this way for nothing. However, he walked out of the other room smiling, tastefully dressed, clean, and oh-so-cute! His pictures really don’t do him justice. The next day we tried a whole bunch of times to get a picture that looked like him, to no avail. Anyway, he invited us out onto the balcony. We threaded our way through the groups of stylish, possibly intelligent college students and could breathe a bit once we got outside. I really wasn’t quite sure how to act around all those people who were obviously much older than me, and especially how to act towards Brian. But after a few minutes he gave me a hug that told me that it wasn’t just a drunken make out session the week before. He introduced me to a few of his friends, who didn’t seem very cool (probably because they were drunk), then Kevin and Panda decided to go down underneath the balcony to the bonfire that someone had built in the lawn below. For the first time, me and Brian where sort of alone. My memory of the is part is in 1080p. He smiled at me, I smiled back.

“I’m glad you came.”
“So am I.”

So cute! Eek! A bit later two of his friends came over and started talking to him. It was this fashionable couple, a thin blond girl in this dark blouse and a guy in jeans, a leather jacket, and this wildly curly dishwater hair. He chatted with them for a bit, and since I had nothing in common with them I couldn’t help but be taciturn.

We didn’t spend much more time at the party. 20 minutes later, Kevin, Panda, and I had started the trek back to the car. We were to follow Brian back to his new apartment in McKinleyville. Earlier in the night, Panda had asked us if we needed a place to sleep, and I really wasn’t sure. For all we knew, we could be driving back that same night. All I knew was me and Kevin don’t make plans. Plans are so 1992.

Anyway, His apartment was really nice. It wasn’t decorated at all, and just had a big pile o’boxes where all the furniture should be, but it had so much potential. Me and Kevin were all “You know you’re gay when the first thing you think about is how you want to decorate someone else’s house.”

The night wore on. There was no real furniture, so we all sat in a circle on the floor. I really had no idea what was going on me and Brian-wise. He was just unpacking stuff and attempting to keep us entertained.

I don’t remember exactly how this started, but me and Kevin had been listening to that Felix Da Housecat song “Silver Screen Shower Scene” on the way down and for some reason I got the lyrics stuck in my head. We must have listened to the song at least four or five times on both trips, so I started saying the first lyric of it to Kevin to see if he could supply me with the rest of it. So basically every 45 minutes I would lean over to Kevin and say “Speed seduction in a magazine” and he would just shake his head and go “I don’t remember lyrics.”

Well, by the end of the night I had him doing the whole chorus. for the record, it’s:

“Speed seduction in a magazine
Endless pleasure in a limousine
In the back shakes a tambourine
Nicotine from a silver screen”

Listen to those lyrics repeated 40 times and you won’t be able to get out of your head either. It was really amusing. To me, mostly, but amusing nonetheless.

We had a pretty good conversation (there weren’t any uncomfortable silences), but Panda had to go to work early in the morning, so we gave her a ride home around one a.m. I still wasn’t sure whether we were going to stay at Brian’s house, but she assured us that we could come over and crash on her couch if we needed to. As I mentioned before, she lived like two blocks away from him, but we insisted on giving her a ride home anyway. We were glad we did because right when we got back it started raining yet again.

The conversation continued, although I have no idea what we talked about. About this time, Brian stopped unpacking and came to sit with us. I was in a vague sort of panic… the kind that just makes you feel tired because you’ve done all sorts of things and they haven’t gone the way you want. It was then that he started to flirt with me, tickling my knee, and then we were holding hands again. As 3 a.m. rolled around, we were all completely exhausted but it was still a really vague who was sleeping where. He made sort of a nest of blankets in the middle of the living room for me, and said that Kevin could sleep in his bed. By process of elimination, I should have realized that me and him were going to be sleeping together, but somehow this obviousness didn’t penetrate my sleep-deprived brain and I was bummed that I was going to sleep alone. So as him and Kevin went out for a smoke break, I made a fortress of solitude underneath my blankets and played Breakout on my iPod (while listening to Silver Screen Shower Scene, of course).

They returned, and Brian disappeared to go freshen up before bed, so after a few minutes I went up to his bedroom to find him. I was a bit surprised to find Kevin in there, looking quite asleep. He wasn’t, though, and was raving about how comfortable the bed was. One flop on that down comforter and I was in heaven. I literally would have slept with Kevin in the comfy bed and banished Brian to the downstairs, if it would have come to that. This bed. There are no words for it. Comfort squared? Softness times ten to the fifteenth? Something like that. So Brian emerged from the bathroom to find me and Kevin gushing about his bed. One thing was for certain: I wasn’t sleeping downstairs on the floor. Brian seemed cool with that, so I went downstairs to stash my car keys and iPod in my Converse, then came back up and snuggled in with Brian. I wish that I could replay that night for ever and ever and ever. There are no words. Cuddles squared? Cute intimacy times ten to the fifteenth? Something like that. I have no clue when we actually did get to sleep, because Kevin was snoring raucously on the other side of the bed. We eventually moved downstairs and fell asleep down there. Eek! That night was like the most cudding I’ve done this entire year. It was wonderful.

Stay tuned for Sunday’s post.

Categories: Ennui

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Who’s got a boyfriend? Oh yeah.

More later.

Categories: Ennui

I just got paid today.

SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS!

(Someone’s getting a PowerBook)

Oh yeah.

Categories: Ennui