the diary of antoine roquentin

I had the most fun I’ve had a long time last night.

Actually, the whole day was rather an adventure. I woke up ridiculously early and had to take the bus. However on the trip, I got within like 10 pages of finishing Wicked. It is such an amazing novel! I could’ve finished it, but I didn’t want the whole impact of it right before work or that would be all it would be thinking about the whole time.

I need to put these all over town

The trip back, however, was where the real craziness started to happen. I had this idea to voyage to Utrecht and get canvases, so I waited in the dark for about 45 minutes for the 67 or 68 to Arden fair. It finally arrived, and we spent the next hour or so in traffic. We had this insane driver who would to slam on the gas and accelerate as fast as he could and then realize he was about to crash into somebody in slam on the brakes.

When he pulled up in front of the mall I swear to God he was going to crash into the bus in front of us, and when I got out he only had about 3 inches of leeway.

So I walked around the mall for a little bit, talking to my mom on the phone, and then started the epic three block voyage to Utrecht. It’s all the way over at Howe Bout Arden, but I took a shortcut across Alta Arden.

So here I come, carrying this enormous bag full of this 2 1/2 foot by 3 /2 foot canvas. The dimensions don’t sound big, but the canvases were turning into a big sail in the wind while I was walking.

As I was coming back, I saw my bus leaving, so I had to go into the mall and wait an hour for the next one. I was starving so I got some Japanese food and ate at the table where Kelly and I would always hang out when we would come to the mall.

An hour later, I hopped on the 23 and got off somewhere near my house… it was a long walk home. But I succeeded. On the way back, I ended up standing next to this very large woman surrounded by a bunch of candy wrappers on the ground. She smelled like a brewery and slowly told me that she needed $.75 to pick up her kids. I was going to patiently remind her that bus fare was actually two dollars, but I gave her a dollar to try to shut her up. Unfortunately, she kept drunkenly asking me whether I was an artist, and I told her that I wasn’t. I spent most of the time explaining Mondrian’s work to her, just so she wouldn’t ask me any more questions.

She even asked me if I had a business card. I really did have copies of my card, but I wasn’t going to give any to this bitch.

I had just gotten home and taken a shower when Brian showed up at my house with his new friend Sam. I think they started talking about a week or two ago. All I knew about him was that he had a Marilyn Manson tattoo and hated Eat Me, Drink Me, so he was already in my “friend” category.

We drove down to this place near the river where I went with Adrian a few times. There’s this huge bridge and a bunch of trails and such. It’s really beautiful at night because you’re really high up and you can see the river winding off into the distance. What really happened was that we got kind of freaked out about these bums on the bridge, eventually walked past them, and then we got close to this flashing light and I could’ve sworn there was some guy standing there in the shadows, so we turn around and went back. There was totally some kind of drug deal going on because there were all these cars parked in the middle of nowhere.

After that, we went to the AM PM and got chocolate while Sam got gas.

Really good bait. At the am pm.

The whole time Brian had been talking to Zero, someone that he had known for ever, and who I had heard about thirdhand. The whole night Brian was trying to pitch us all getting together. And it turned out that we were bored enough to acquiesce. I was sort of interested to meet him, just because of the stories. So we parked near the theatre house, I got out my laptop, and we started watching the Goldfrapp tour DVD until Zero was done at the play.

Sam was talking about how much he didn’t get along with Zero… although they’d had sex…which didn’t make a lot of sense.

Next thing I know he jumps in the car, and is sitting across from me in the back seat. He insists on going to Safeway to get beer, and then we’re in his living room, nervously nursing beers, Sam staring half-serious daggers at Zero.

And then Zero gets out these puppets and starts making them talk to us. And somehow, two beers later, we decide to watch Dancer in the Dark and make fun of it. So we’re laughing our asses off while Zero mimes all of the Bjork songs in the movie with Stella, this llama puppet. We keep going outside for smoke breaks, and then Aaron calls Brian, and they talk outside for the rest of the movie.

Zero and I are using Stella to mime the part in the movie where Bjork gets hanged…we got all into it, he had me tie a noose (yes, I can tie a noose from memory…how hardcore is that, lol). We were all acting out the last scene with puppets until she died.

Bjork’s death in Dancer in the Dark, with llama puppets.

We stayed entirely too late. I think I got back at like 4 a.m., but I haven’t laughed that much since I can’t remember when. It’s too bad all those great jokes are lost to the ages. I really do need to have a camera crew to follow me and Brian around.

It’s really strange, Zero looks so much like my old best friend Joe… which made even a little more awkward that Brian said he was hitting on me the whole night. I told him his joke was lamer than FDR’s legs and he asked me to marry him. LOL.

We were arguing about Dogme 95 movies. It’s really bad to have an argument about Dogme 95 movies when you’re watching one that’s TERRIBLE. I have seen some Dogme 95 movies I liked, like Gummo. And I think that it’s a really revolutionary concept for telling a certain kind of story. It all movies were Dogme 95 movies I’ve got probably kill myself, but you can do things with that kind of narrative that you can’t do with any other kind of filmmaking.

So I have this huge canvas staring me down, but I don’t really get to do anything with it until the weekend. I have to go to class in an hour, and before that I have to figure out the two take-home test questions that I didn’t quite get.

As the geeky aside, I am in love with my new Bluetooth headphones/headset. I can does rock out to music and then when someone calls me I just hit the button on the headset and then it switches to the call mode. I can even stream music wirelessly from my phone…although that seems to make it crash after like 20 minutes. Fucking Windows Mobile piece of shit.

I found it really interesting that Zero didn’t know Adrian.

Oh did I mention that I talked to him? I think I was trying to intentionally not write about it, but Adrian left me all these messages and then we ended up talking on Monday. I still don’t really know what to make of it. The timing is the little dubious, but I think I’ve been broken up with Terry for longer than I think. Terry still won’t talk to me. Whatever.

Adrian tried to drop the bomb on me that he was married and I kind of laughed and said I already knew. I mean, I’m not a total troglodyte. I do go on Facebook once in a while.

I found myself doing most of the talking. I never remembered how slowly he talks. Normally he would only talk that slow when he was totally zonked out on pills, but I guess he talks that way all the time now. Weird. He tried to tell me all this crap about how his company is incorporating and he’s moving out into an apartment. I didn’t really have much to say. He kept using the word “wife.”

I’m not going to make much of an effort to talk to him. I don’t have any respect for him, so I don’t really know what to say to him. Talking to him is such a waste of time. He only talks to the people that he wants something from. Even if it’s just conversation, I don’t really see the point.

I have listened to this stupid song “Mandy Goes to Med School” like 20 times and it is about NOTHING. The lyrics have no meaning. This should have been a B-side, but the melody is too damn catchy.

Well, it’s nearly 1:30. I need to take a shower and get ready for class.

Categories: Ennui

So I came up with the best hack in the world.

I’m wearing my normal headphones under my voice recognition headset. They are my noise isolating headphones, so I hear this weird echo of my own voice inside my head. It’s very strange. However, when I connect the USB headset directly to the virtual machine it seems to get much better audio quality. A signal strength of 20 versus 17-18 with the audio passed through from Mac OS. AND with my super headphone-over-headphone technology, I can write and listen to music.

I guess the simplest solution would have been to install iTunes inside the virtual machine, but that doesn’t work. I suspect it’s because the copy of Windows I’m using is all stripped down, and they probably stripped out something that iTunes needs.

So I woke up early (well, eleven) and I got all ready to go down to give all of Terry’s stuff back. We had arranged to meet before 1 p.m. So I got everything ready went down and started my scooter. However, the day before when I was driving back from the mall my scooter had started making this weird metal grinding noise. My sixth car sense told me to take in, and by some miracle the dealership was open. So I went down there and let them listen to the noise and immediately he told me that the clutch was totally busted.

And they can’t fix it until Friday.

Drove home at 10 mph, and basically I don’t have a car all week. My grandma said that she would let me borrow her car (it was sort of a tentative thing, we are going to talk about it in depth on Sunday. But I need to. There is no bus that will get me home and the only bike in the garage is this janky piece of shit where the tire doesn’t stay inflated for more than like five minutes. I found this out on an ill-fated trip to Washington Mutual to deposit all the rest of my birthday money.

But through all that I was actually kind of laughing at myself. I get really comfortable in my life and it’s actually kind of fun when things go wrong. So when I was having a good time today.

Well, it was definitely a roller coaster ride. First the scooter news, then the exhausting ride to WaMu on my dead uncle John’s equally embalmed bike, then Brian calls. Apparently Aaron wants to come over and they are going to have sex talk about the relationship. By some kind of freaky drama inducing miracle, my grandma actually leaves and goes to her boyfriend’s house.

So I invite them over, although I was actually out at the time. So I get back and they were… um… indisposed. They came out looking very awkward and we watched Spanish TV for a while (it was the only thing on) until I got sick of it and plugged in my laptop to the TV and put on Kathy Griffin. I was sort of making jokes about what they’d done but it was really hard to lighten the mood. Sex with an ex. Not fun.

Well, it’s fun, but heart-wrenching.

They go outside to talk for a while so I put on the Goldfrapp tour DVD *dum da dum* Black Cherry *humming along* Brian comes in CRYING. I have NO idea what to do, so I gave him a hug, and talked with him for a while. I don’t know what to say. Make some ice cream. I don’t like Rocky Road, but I eat it anyway. I guess all three of us went into that night with hopes of a certain kind of thing happening, and we all got annoyed and frustrated.

Katie came over and we all drove around, eventually ending up at Taco Bell. I got some kind of burrito (God damn I should never get fast food, the thing is doing somersaults in my stomach), then we dropped Brian off and we went to this park (I really have no clue where we were) and I hung out with Katie’s girlfriend while Katie and her boyfriend hung out. I didn’t ask how that all works out.

I must say, though, the Katie has such terrible taste in women. That girl she’s dating *makes puking motion* it wasn’t just the way she looked or her clothes (which were varying degrees of passé 1990s skater girl horror), it was how she sung along to the most tawdry songs in the radio. Anyone that feels empowered by Uncle Kracker…I’m just done talking about that girl. *shudder*

However, she actually had a lot of interesting things to say. We were on the swings in doing this thing where you twist one of the baby swings way up and then turn upside down and let it spin you all around. I did it and my glasses flew off and we spent like 20 minutes trying to find them. It was really funny. And she was talking about how her boyfriend would always be in jail at how her best friend cheated on her with her girlfriend or something. I wasn’t really clear on how it all happened, but there was jail and cheating. Wasn’t sure if she was actually commiserating with me about Terry. I can’t really explain it myself. I mean, I can explain our last fight, but that wasn’t really the reason. I wasn’t being very convincing.

We drove around for a little bit longer, and then Katie dropped me off.

All in all, it was an eventful day.

Terry. I just don’t know where we stand these days. He blocked me. My take on it is that he’s trying to keep his power of the no by restricting and what mediums I can communicate with him in. He always did that. He would always do his big tirade about how much he hated me via instant message because he knew that my wrists would start to hurt and I wouldn’t be able to respond. He would not let me call him when he was angry. I wanted him to call me. I wanted him to yell at me or something. Prove to me that he had anything running in his veins other than a vague need to be conventional.

He says he deals with emotions in a different way than me. If sublimating them and letting the fester is a way of dealing with them, then I guess he’s right. I guess I shouldn’t be so self-righteous about his emotions. I just can’t be with someone that is so in the closet that they feel anything. I mean, I might say I’m fine but it’s obvious that I’m not. He will just give me this pitying look and I will be the one crying. I only saw him cry once. And I think it was something that I wrote about him. Which doesn’t make me feel like such a great person.

However, what Sara said really resonated with me:

I am personally fascinated by the fact that people are willing to read something as personal as a blog (because honestly, does it get much more personal than that?) and then have the audacity to be cheesed off over something they discovered.
What is the difference between the person that you were before they found out how you felt and the person you are now that they know?
Not so very much.

Is it bad that I think that it’s a little hot that one of my best friends had sex on my bed today?

I’m going with “no.” And by another odd coincidence the sheets were in the washer the whole time they were here. So clean sheets for me, w00t.

I can’t stop munching on this little box of dried cranberries that my mom sent me for my birthday. I sit here looking around my room and I’m trying to think of what I’m supposed to be doing, and there really isn’t anything except for my homework. And then I broaden the question to a more existential quandary… and I don’t really know. School is going to be over in another month and there’s not a whole lot I can take during the interim. This week without a car I’m going to get a lot of reading done on the bus. I guess that’s a good thing. I guess I just miss the feeling that I had a bright future.

I know nearly all the gay guys in Sacramento by proxy or by MySpace. And it’s really disappointing. I guess the only guy that I really liked that nothing happened with was that Josh guy I met at HorseCow. We slept together, but I was really revolted by how promiscuous he was… and he never called me again.

Well, I guess the promiscuity wasn’t such a big deal but he had a kid. Biggest turnoff ever since I’m only like 22.

I tried to redesign my “professional” site (well, make a page for my web portfolio), but that didn’t actually happen. I ended up with this stupid design in Photoshop that looked like corporate letterhead for some defunct Midwestern laundromat chain.

I guess it really bothered me that all of Katie’s friends used the word “gay” as a synonym for things that suck.

And I’m sorry, but that’s not OK. It would be like walking around Oak Park saying that everything looks so “negroish,” and then prefacing it with “no offense.”

Bitch, please.

And so I really have no idea what to think about Aaron. He didn’t say “I love you” back to Brian, that was what started him crying. But really, there was no easy way out of that situation.

He’s right that it was easier to break up now than later, but I don’t know… seems like there’s more going on that I’m not privy to.

Damn, it’s almost two. I’m going to sleep.

Categories: Ennui

Okay, seriously. I can NOT live without one of these!

Terry was—how shall I say—incensed by yesterday’s post. I was sort of waiting for him to pop up on iChat and try to tear down who I am. Well, he did try…but I guess I’m a better person than even I think. This was the best he could come up with:

The art I hated is the art people like you produce.
It’s not art, it’s a fake way to get accepted into some group full of people just like you. [Yeah, my big group of fake-ass trendy friends. Oh wait...you're talking about yourself again, honey.]
[...]
Well, you can put up a front to me if you’d like to, but let’s not play coy, I can see right through you.
You’re basically translucent, and there is no content. [Yeah, that's right...no content...like an...um...empty mySQL database.]
[...]
You’re a walking contradiction spouting out double-standards and judging each person you meet based on the way you feel life should be lived.
Here’s a fucking epiphany for you, Darius: You aren’t perfect, you aren’t even near it. Nor are you correct, or better than anybody else. [I must have missed my "I am perfect everyone do what I say" post. Was that last week, guys?]
[...]
You see what you want to see.
And don’t think you have any room waltzing in here acting like you have any room to judge any person’s life. [Moral judgments are all subjective and are never universal, duh]
I’m a whole hell of a lot less depressed than you are, so I must be doing something right.
I’m not the self-loathing one here who cries about losing all of his friends, alright? [I mourn the loss of my true friends that would bail me out of jail at 2 a.m., not ditch me on my birthday and apologize a week later *cough* the only friend of his I met]
[...]
If anybody is shallow, it’s you.
You think that just because you hang with the artists that you’re an intellectual.
You’re not.
Reading some books and watching some indie films hardly makes you cultured.
Or intelligent. [No, it doesn't, but having an interest in literature and film usually stems from a desire to be exposed to new ideas. And yes, to clarify, not the kind of ideas that you get at Club 21.]

It was shitty to write about the reasons we broke up, but I’m not apologizing. And I don’t think I hang in a very “artsy crowd.” I mean, Christen and I paint and write and such, but (speaking for myself) I’m not very devoted to creating capital-A art, I just don’t have the time. But I do enjoy being creative in as many ways as I can.

I tried to preface all my conclusions with the reality that they mean nothing outside of a framework of how I achieve personal happiness. I dunno, it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

We’re just different people. And I knew from day one that the only way this could end would be him getting mad at me. Whatever. I don’t hold anything against him, we just don’t have compatible lifestyles.

I’m not as tactful as I should be when I write, but then, if you’re going to spend all day wrapping unpleasant truths in pretty bows, that’s time wasted that should be spent getting to the root of the issue. And I found it. That was the issue I couldn’t deal with. Uncreative people are boring.

He told me that he planned to have this cute weekend in the city for us, since he had money, but he canceled it after reading my post. I don’t really know how to take it. He has been (in every way except for emotionally) giving, and I appreciate that. It’s just that it’s not going to work.

Those issues don’t go away.

My mom always bitches that I lose too many friends because of my blog. But really, if I’m not going to be honest about people that bring me happiness and those who don’t, what’s the fucking point?

Terry and I don’t live in the same world. We have excellent chemistry, and he just makes me melt, but that’s not enough. Trent’s right. Love is not even close to enough.

I guess things are sliding downhill with Brian and Aaron too (post-breakup). They aren’t talking as much, and it seems like Aaron is kind of reaching his saturation point with contact with Brian. Heard this like thirdhand, but it’s really sad. They were such a cute couple, and Brian seemed happy.

I did a shit ton of homework today, though I didn’t get as caught up as I want to. They’re having my belated birthday party tomorrow morning. I stayed downtown for hours hoping they’d be asleep when I got back, I guess. They were waiting for me, it looked like. I even stopped at Target looking for god knows what to buy me an extra half-hour. But now we’re even. I waited all day for them, they waited a few hours for me. I know two wrongs don’t make a right, but two opposing social faux pas can cancel out. It’s a rule. I read about it in algebra.

God, I hate these people.

I’m happy to report that the horrible, sucking emo void I felt for a while when Terry and I broke up has now sort of fallen in on itself. I feel self-actualized. I feel like I can say what I feel is right and not have to apologize for it. Things that used to cause me anxiety I don’t care about. I went and ran two errands today before work, I was so in the zone. NO! NOT IN THE ZONE! I am half totally kidding.

We argue back and forth, but don’t see each others’ sides. Maybe it’s best that we’re not going to be friends, no matter how much I still care for him.

C’est la vie, I guess.

Categories: Ennui

Categories: Ennui

I haven’t felt much like writing. I have, but I keep obsessing about the same things.

It’s my birthday on the 18th, btw.

Christen and I are celebrating our birthdays today.

I got her something super cute.

Went and visited her after I had dinner with Terry last night. We ended up eating at this one place we went where we were first dating.

I miss him terribly. The whole time we hung out I just wanted to grab him and kiss him. This separation is killing me, but I keep trying to stick to my mantra “It wouldn’t have worked, it wouldn’t have worked.” But like, Christen and Allen fight and they still like each other.

We were talking about it (oh god, here it goes, better switch to voice-rec)

Oh. Voice-rec isn’t working.

When you’re using it, it’s like magic. You speak, and words show up. With nearly perfect accuracy. And sometimes, you fire it up, speak, and nothing happens. You start to think “Was this all a lie? Do we really have voice-recognition software? Is this real?” And for one Philip K. Dick-ian moment, I’m not quite sure.

I’m adapting the user files…maybe that will help. It says it’ll take three hours.

Worked fine before that stupid 1.1 update. I swear, updates fucking break everything. It’s so hard to be on the cutting edge and also have everything work. Actually, it’s nearly impossible.

I should open my birthday cards. I don’t know what to say to these people. I guess I’ll write letters back.

If my voice-rec ever starts working again.

Categories: Ennui