> Lacquer - Behind
> M.I.A. - Amazon
> Nine Inch Nails - The Frail (live)
> Peaches - Lovertits

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about getting old. I have been riding my bike a lot since my car died, and I usually hang around the college. Since it’s right across the street from the high school, I see a lot of high schoolers. On one hand, I jump for joy that I’m not in high school anymore. On the other hand, I’m not innocent like that anymore. I will probably never again have a mohawk. I will never again be able to shave half my head because I feel like it. I will no longer be able to wear combat boots with pajamas. It’s not that I can’t, but I’m over all that angst stuff. I wasted about two hours on Friday hanging out in the student lounge and watching the high school students come in to buy stuff out of the vending machines.

I was ostensibly talking with Amy, an acquaintance from my photography class ages ago, but really I was puzzled by the fact that I wasn’t a high school student anymore. I saw the cutest guy in this military-green blazer over a t-shirt. I felt so unstylish and old. I would never have been able to cook up that outfit at 17, and I’m even less able at 20 with my $30 in the bank account. I don’t know… I just feel like a never grew out of the person I was in high school. I used to like my frustration during those years forged the person that I am now, but I’m not so sure now. It just feels weird to me that I can’t identify with teenagers anymore. I’m in my early twenties. Criminy, that sounds so weird! I guess I just need to get use to being…old? Hm.

I’m feeling nostalgic for all the wonderful conversations I had with Joe, the incredible Drift field trips with Molly, the amazing nights of tag at KidTown at 2 a.m. with Misty and Selena… I just wish I could go back and relive it all. I’m sure I’ve said this a million times, but one of my favorite moments in the universe was that last night that we all played tag. We finally had enough people so that it was fun and we didn’t get exhausted. Misty and Selena and everybody was there, there was no drama, I had just started falling for Ripley, he was there too…I felt perfectly at peace. A lover, friends that respected me and knew how to have fun…I had it all. But look how it all ended. Stagnation is never a good thing, but everybody moved on. Molly moved to Chico, Selena got married to Josh Coop (a grade-school bully of mine), Misty is living with a boyfriend and we never see each other, and Joe moved to Portland.

It’s endlessly selfish of me, but I want to erase everybody’s memory and have one last amazing road trip…but that will never happen. And even if it did, I would still be in this mood after a year went by. I hope my dad really does kick me out. Kelly is pretty much the most important person in my personal universe, so living together would be SO cool!!! It would be like one of our endless Mountain Dew-fueled Crash Bandicoot all-nighters when we were kids! Except it would never end! I remember every Christmas we always would plan to catch Grammie coming out and setting out the presents from Santa but we would always fall asleep. It was so fun. And that one time that we tried to steal the soda from underneath Grammie’s bed while she was asleep! And the Schweppes! EEK!

I guess I’ve had a wonderful life. I shouldn’t complain about a lull in the fun and the friends. It will definitely pick up.

And you can’t appreciate the good times unless you’ve truly been bored.

I was so close to getting Dragon to work, but XP inside the virtual machine couldn’t grab the input from my microphone. I have a relatively expensive headset, the DSP-500 USB model (with digital signal processing and all sorts of noise-canceling goodness) and the thing popped up in XP saying that it understood what I had plugged in, but it couldn’t “start” the mic. I think the incompatibility has something to do with “ejecting” the mic from use by OSX before I plug it in to the virtual machine, but I don’t know how to do that. Where are those UNIX hackers when I need them? I think the man of my dreams will be a command-line god.

Parallels (the company that makes this software) says that the USB device support will be improved in future betas, so I guess I have to just wait. I did import my user files (an extremely time-consuming process), so when it does work I will be able to immediately start using it. However, I need to write a longer post now. Time to boot into windows. :(

I think I just got Dragon to work inside the virtual machine! I was able to use the “shared folders” function to grab the files off my external drive and imbed them in the machine!

Obligatory screenshot:

Cinema homework makes me need to misquote Shakespeare:

Cinema is a rambling, nonsensical, paragraph-long series of questions written by an idiot, full of mispronunciations and factual errors, signifying perpetual boredom.

> theSTART - Gorgeous

Oh, I forgot to tell you some gossip! Thomas called me last night out of the blue (for a while I thought he was Royce) and I talked to him for a while about my biology assignment and how taxonomy varied from being mildly interesting to completely boring. I am actually enjoying finding out how all these plants and animals are related. The topic that I have been wanting to do my research paper on is how biologists classify animals into different taxonomic categories. Is taxonomic a word? I had better find out before I write my paper. Anyway, it just fascinates me how animals that are not very related genetically can look very similar (due to evolutionary pressures weeding out all the ones that don’t look a certain way). Anyway, I hope he gives me the go-ahead, but I probably won’t know until Monday.

Speaking of Monday, I think me and Amanda are going to have a party that day. I think I might have to cancel though, as I don’t have a ride home (my dad falls asleep at 8 p.m. like clockwork).

Darn it, I meant to talk about the gossip! The first thing out of Thomas’s mouth was about how Jordan was screwing this ugly guy in Brookings and he had told the guy that Thomas was really jealous of ugly Brookings guy (hereafter UBG), so UBG apparently called Thomas and yelled at him about it. Thomas tried to assure UBG the Jordan was making it all up, but as usual, the people that Jordan associates with aren’t exactly Nobel Prize recipients, if you get my drift. I thought it was really funny, and I think Thomas thought so too even though he was trying to play up the drama of it. After that, the conversation sorta fell silent. Thomas never has anything to say, so I began to guide the “conversation” to topics I could talk about, like that movie that I rented (Chuck and Buck) and a whole biology thing. After a few minutes, he said that he had to tell me something and started a sentence about meeting this “really, really, hot guy” and then he said that his friend showed up and he had to go and he would call me back. I sort of chuckled to myself as he hung up. I guess if I was a different person I would have been offended that he didn’t call me back, but I would only be offended if I was an idiot. He never means what he says. It greatly amuses me that ignorant, insincere people like Thomas exist. To me, he’s more of a lifesize child’s toy where you don’t have to pull the string to get him to talk. Come on, when a raccoon can beat you on an IQ test, you are just not human anymore :) I guess it’s not really a amazingly juicy gossip, but I just thought it was funny.

So yeah…existence.

I had another zombie dream last night. I have so many, I don’t even remember the plots anymore. I don’t understand the subconscious significance of zombies. Maybe it has something to do with fatalism. Can the subconscious think about concepts like that? I need to read more Freud.

Last night I finally remembered something that I had been meaning to do for ages: look up Matt on MySpace. He told me that he had a profile ages ago, and I had just never remembered to find it. I added him as a friend a whim. I wish he would fill out his interests. I can never feel like I know people unless they have a detailed MySpace profile.

That reminded me of a salient W. Somerset Maugham quote: “Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.”

Case in point: Anthony.

I simply cannot stop listening to “Turnstile Blues” and “Gorgeous.” I have flashbacks of driving around in San Francisco and endlessly singing along to Nine Inch Nails.