the diary of antoine roquentin

Today I went over to American River College to take my English placement test. I got 97/105. Not bad.

It has been ridiculously hot here. It is 99° right now, and tomorrow it is supposed to reach 106°. Kelly and Lacey went to the river over in Auburn, and Christen just got back from swimming as well. I guess I should be over at my grandmother’s house, but there is no Internet there. She said she would be home for like a 15 minute window between her two social engagements, but I don’t feel like waiting for her.

The drive down was perilous. However, I escaped death multiple times. Somehow I missed the exit to 299 and I didn’t get to stop to see Molly, but I’m sure I will be up there sometime soon.

I have about $800 in the bank, and that has to last me until I get a job. I really need to be looking now, when being broke isn’t such a pressing problem… but my first priority is getting my school started.

That college is huge. It is easily 10 times the size of CR Del Norte. However, the wonderful thing is nobody knows you. You can bumble around looking at your map (which I totally did not do, I took great pains to blend in) and it doesn’t matter at all. You are not going to see every single person you pass in the hall in some class. It’s a good thing.

I put on my New York mask, which you need to have. Steps to achieve your very own New York blending-in expression:

1) Your motivation is: bored. Incredibly bored. So bored that if some insane doomsday-spouting lunatic screams right in your face, you’ll keep on walking. Just keep thinking: “I live here.” Look uninvolved in reality by musing about a job that you don’t have (today it was a clerk at the UPS store).

2) Tired. Stifle a few yawns. Nobody is as important as you. Nobody at this place, anyway.

3) Keep walking. Never loiter, look at maps, etc. The only deviations that are permitted are to change to a new song on the iPod or to take a cell call. While on the call, never say anything but “yeah”, “totally”, or other such things.

Those are my tips for not looking like an outsider, wherever you go. It works well for me.

I really screwed up my voice-recognition software and I had tocompletely reinstall it (thank the gods for backups) and now it is sucking. Oh well. I need to upgrade to a MacBook soon… carting around my huge CRT monitor is not an option and I need to have access to my schoolwork at all times.

I should drive back over to Grammie’s house, this software isn’t working very well and I’m getting quite angry at it. Probably it’s the heat.

Categories: Ennui

I, Darius Capulet, am leaving Crescent City in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Six at prescisely eight o’clock ante meridien.

I shall arrive in Chico at two o’clock to call upon the indomitably affable Molly and family at their lakeside chalet. In the evening I shall attend Madame Kelly’s gathering. She has not sent word as to where the affair will take place. However, the locations she frequents are known to me and I do have the luxury of sending her a telegram upon my arrival. I presume Mr. Devin, back from Los Angeleshire will be attending. On this voyage I also fully intend to call on my dear grandmother at her manor in Carmichael, preferably before Madame Kelly’s gathering. It would be prudent for the servants to unpack my things from the carraige at my grandmother’s manor while I enjoy a bit of bridge or polo before I continue on.

The servants were almost unable to fit my posessions in the carraige this afternoon. I had to help them liquidate the contents of one suitcase and spread the contents in between the other parcels. I was not amused.

As one final task, my father has requested that I acquire and reproduce for him the manual of operations for the cellular telephone I am to mail him upon my arrival in fair Sacramento.

However, with the antiquated equipment at my disposal, it may take all night for the reproduction of the manual to be complete…the current rate is one page every fifteen minutes.

My dear friends, I bid you adieu.

Categories: Ennui

This waiting is hell.

I have watched so much television I feel like my brain is going to explode. I shipped my mom’s boxes today, but other than that today was pointless.

After my shameless rant last night about my computer, today the built-in audio stopped working. I didn’t do anything, it just stopped working and the computer can’t detect it. I don’t use the analog output a terrible amount, as I usually use my USB headset, but it still is annoying. I’m glad I’m moving. I can bring it into the Apple store and have them fix it. I want to say that it is somehow related to me upgrading my RAM, but I doubt it. I mean, if that was the case you would think it would not work right after I swapped out the RAM, not weeks later. Maybe I should open it and have a look. Nah, all my computer surgery tools are packed up.

It’s the understatement of the century, but I can’t wait for this week to end. I will be able to actually buy good novels to read… I will be able to start school again… and I will have a cool new phone.

I don’t know, I keep thinking to myself that I should be trying to do something other than watch downloaded television shows. If I did die on the trip down there, my last week would have been exceptionally boring. Well, it would be a less pointless death then dying on my way to work in Crescent Shitty.

I just hate this malaise. In this place, I have no future. It’s like one of those episodes of a sci-fi show where they keep living the same day over and over again. I just won’t be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel until my fully packed car is barreling down Hwy. 101.

I sort of halfway know one of the guys at the Mail Room (where I shipped my packages today). He told me that my old friend Selena had her baby a few days ago. She had it with one of my childhood bullies, Josh Coop. I remember her being so carefree and youthful, and now she has fulfilled every Crescent City cliché in the book. I guess I kind of feel hurt that she cut off contact with everyone. People just do that when they get married… I don’t know if I’ve ever forgiven Mindy for emotionally abandoning me.

I know it’s unfair to hold people responsible for such things, but I loved Mindy. We used to cuddle all the time, and I felt like we had this bond. I didn’t feel anything sexual towards her, but it was this deep bond. We’d both been hurt by the same guy and had grown stronger for it. Even after she moved away we kept in touch. She would call me from her boarding school and tell me endless funny stories about her classmates.

Then came Garrett.

And I lost her.

I guess everything has to come to an end, but why does it have to be a bitter one? I know I’m complicit in all this somehow… but I can’t unravel it. I idly wonder why I’m not friends with TJ any more. He stopped talking to me in high school, and I never forgave him. I could send him a MySpace message right now, but I won’t. We’re different people now. He would probably think I am childish for still doing all the things I did in high school…endless geekery. He might ride a motorcycle now, but I know there’s someone behind his façade that would love to play a TCP/IP game of Warpath. And that just depresses me. Why do we have to keep piling on layers of bullshit to make people think we’re different? I don’t know. What would it accomplish to tell Mindy that she hurt me? It would just make me seem even more lonesome and emotionally insecure.

I don’t know, I’m supposed to call her when I get my new phone. Years ago I would call her when I was really depressed, and it would always make it worse. I think deep down I’m afraid that she found happiness and that I never will.

I feel stagnated. I can’t comprehend the possibility of making new friends in Sacramento. I can play back the years of the Samantha, Steve, Tawna, etc. drama in my head in a split-second. I remember the first time I talked to Tawna in the student lounge, and now, three years later, I talk to Joe on IM once or twice a month. That is the culmination of hundreds of dollars and years of hangout time spent. I mean, I guess I would do it all over again, but I feel like I need something…tangible…out of all this. Maybe I’m lonely. Maybe I need a boyfriend. I hate that whole thing though. For a month he’s all I can think of, then three months later everything he does annoys me and I burn the whole thing to the ground.

Relationships never solve anything. I’ve never gotten out of any of them with less problems that than I came in with. I mean, the cuddling is great, but I’d rather cuddle with someone I don’t want to have sex with. I feel like sex cheapens physical contact.

I would give all the money in the world to take back those trysts with Thomas. I’ve never felt so cheap. Fucking the stupid, ignorant American fools that are destroying the universe. I got a perverse thrill out of how humiliated he looked, but in reality it was humiliating for both of us. Me fucking someone I hated, and whatever petty thing he thought about me.

I watched Liberty News again… maybe that’s why I’m in such a black cloud. I feel the terrible things happening in the world… Chinese people having to work 14 hours a day to make fucking Mardi Gras beads. And I know there’s not one thing that I can do to stop all the corruption that’s going on. I feel like I’m an observer from the 20th century transported back to the days of the Roman senate, able to see everything that’s going wrong but powerless to fix any of it.

America is headed for a crash. On that show it said that Americans spend 120% of what we make. Our government is a $9 trillion in debt. I need to move back to my family’s village in Italy and wait for this all to blow over. But I can’t. My dad and his girlfriend talk nostalgically about living like the Amish. However, there would be no medicine so you would die of things like cancer by default, and if there were some sort of global catastrophe they would be no way to avert it through science.

I know I use this metaphor a lot, but you can’t close Pandora’s box. I complain about Chinese labor practices on a computer that was built in China. Let’s see… I’m sure my tablet was made in China. No, Taiwan. My scanner is a toss-up between Japan and China. Hmm…it doesn’t say. I hate this world but there’s no way to go back. Hitler and Stalin will live again in new forms. America’s economy will crash, and a strong leader will emerge. A demagogue. Germany in 1935 all over again. You’ve got to love the Bush administration’s agenda, and the kids never read the history book, they will never know they’re stuck in it.

On a slightly less depressing note, today I watched that South Park episode where Stan has the fish from the Indian burial ground that kills people… it was SO FREAKING FUNNY. I had totally forgot about the “spooky vision” where there are pictures of Barbra Streisand all over the screen. I was cracking up like never before. Matt Stone and Trey Parker are gods.

But yeah…doom, capitalism, kill the bourgeoisie, etc.

See you tomorrow.

Same bat time, same bat channel.

Categories: Ennui

Today I attempted to redesign my web site…and I failed yet again. I had a good idea and I made some really cool graphics, but when it comes to actually laying it out on the page of I just don’t know what to do. I don’t want to lay it out using tables, because that looks clunky and it doesn’t scale to fit people on different screen resolutions… but I don’t understand enough about CSS to lay it out using that. I need to take a Dreamweaver class.

I want this suave, businesslike web site full of clean lines and shiny graphics but I don’t have the expertise to actually create one.

I just don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I know that it has to get done, but I’m not inspired and I don’t really have any ideas of what to make it look like, I just know I want it to be new and ravishing. I don’t know, I guess I’m in a bad mood now. It could be because I got around four hours of sleep. The new girl wasn’t even there today. My boss says that she’ll be in “a few days” this week, which at least to me is code for “your job is so simple an idiot could do it, she’ll only need a day or two.”

Wonderful.

I need to get some fucking sleep.

Categories: Ennui

Memoribilia.

This is all I have left.

Categories: Ennui