I’m waiting for my scooter to be serviced. I’m at Java Centrale, an indie coffee shop on this traffic island at Fair Oaks and Manzanita.

I got coffee and a muffin, and I don’t particularly like coffee, so I’ve been staring it down.

Christen canceled for the rest of the week.

It’s a sobering thought that when your friends get into relationships, you automatically become #2. I do it too. I’m starting to feel really bitter.

All I can think of is this one A Softer World.

I’m the only one at this coffee shop. I like it. It’s like an island.

I find that comforting.

Been here for an hour, caught up on Engadget and TUAW. Let’s try Reddit. Okay, done with Reddit. It’s now eleven. I’m going to be late for work. Wonderful.

It’s time to listen to Garbage. And read my new favorite blog, Passive Agressive Notes.

Coffee is now room temperature. I wouldn’t mind waiting so long for my scooter, except for they’re billing me at $90 an hour. I need to walk over to WaMu and deposit a check my mom sent me to help out. $75, which I guess is nothing to scoff at.

Taylor (Paris Guy) isn’t online, but if he was, I’d send him this. ‘Cause it made me laugh out loud.

Christen bailed on me today, so I did my taxes and watched two movies.

Taxi Driver and Network. Both excellent films.

Wrists hurting a lot today. Bought Seventh Tree on the iTunes Music Store. I still hate it, save for like two songs that I’m already sick of since it leaked in November. Eh, Alison needs the money.

Have to get up at 8 a.m. and take my scooter in, blow $200 on the servicing. I’m going to get a bunch of money back from my taxes, and I’m just burned out on buying shit. I have an awesome laptop, which was all I ever wanted. I should get a Time Capsule though. I’m sick of having to plug in to my external drives. Wireless is the future.

Also, that new native voice-recognition thing for OSX is coming out, which will be $200 or so. I’m so sick of being poor.

And by 9 a.m. tomorrow morning, my credit card will be back to its limit and I will have no new cool toys. It’s a matter of time until that scooter stops starting entirely.

Isn’t life just peachy?

I need to find something to play my Violator cassette on.

I need to stop stalking my exes on Facebook and hating them. I just want to scream at them that their lives are a lie. Mostly, I’m angry that they are having fun without me and that they’re living fun, happy lives. I feel like my friends have no time for me, and I also feel like I have nothing to contribute to friendships. I don’t know what Katie and I talk about…I was feeling lonely so I ditched class today and hung out with her, the boyfriend, and her friend Wednesday. Most of the time was me chiming in with some witty thing, but I didn’t know what to do or say. I feel like she’s a familiar stranger, and I have a lot of respect for her, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we have a lot in common. I love Katie, she’s one of those people that you can’t help but love.

I’m so sick of living in purgatory. I’m so sick of living out the “safe” life that my mother wants for me. Days like this, I just want to head down to the Greyhound station and go as far away as I can get. But with my current financial situation that would probably be either Reno or San Francisco, which would just be even more soul-crushing.

I miss my mom.

Found out that like all of Mario’s friends hate me, which I guess isn’t surprising. 80% of his conversations are about how immoral and horrible Greg is, and the other 20% is about how trashy Erika is. I would be scared to compile statistics on what I talk about. 10% vague unease about graduating, 20% the drama with Brian, 20% how ambivalent I am about being good friends with Mario, and uh, that’s it? It’s hard to self-analyze.

I just suddenly realize I hate my life, and I’ve known it all along. I hate living with my grandma. I hate my 45 minute each way commute. I hate not having friends that I share many interests with, I hate basically losing my best friend to Allen. I’ve tried to be patient, but I’m sick of this. I mean, Christen deserves the most sugar-coating, eggshell-walking, and blog self-censoring of anyone I know, and I’m afraid of writing anything because it will start the first volley in some ridiculous MySpace war.

I martyr myself too much, and I rarely stick up for myself. So I’m sticking up for myself. Fuck this life. I’m going to do something after I gradate…I dunno, move to another city, something. I’m just so sick of True Love and El Camino and Arden Fair. I feel I’m imprisoned in routine. I have such wanderlust. I’m going to go somewhere when I get my tax return. I don’t care where. Just somewhere far, far away.

Maybe that’s why I talk to Paris Guy so much. He’s my proof that something else exists, some way out of this horrible existence.

On an unrelated note, I’m so fucking sick of all my music.

Any recommendations, guys?

I guess I took a break from writing this week.

I had a lot of fun. I saw Persepolis, which was very good. I also did really well on my last algebra test…100%.

I’ve been getting expensive sandwiches at the co-op, but I feel a lot healthier, so that’s gotta be something right?

I’m working on the web site for my job, trying to increase our Google search results, submitting it to Web directories, working on search engine optimization. I wrote this big conditional PHP statement yesterday to make a dynamically changing sidebar, which was really awesome.

After that huge server crash we had last week visitors are starting to come back, and the last few days we’ve had some really encouraging numbers, which I’m pleased with.

I went on this web design binge last night and redesigned my media vault. I also redesigned cracked LCD, for the millionth time.

I love making splash pages, but for the tedium of actually designing an entire site, I often don’t have the attention span for it. Well, of course, unless I’m getting paid.

My mom has asked me to design a site for her, and I did come up with a preliminary design last night… I was going to sleep on it and see what I thought of it later. It’s really basic… I don’t like it. But I guess every web designer has to start somewhere. I really need to improve my Photoshop skills.

So… Zero and I officially “broke up” yesterday. He wanted me to give him some big overarching reason, but that wasn’t going to happen. I was just sick of all the bullshit.

So we ended up walking down to The Beat and looking at records for a few hours.

I hung out with Christen last week. We met at true love, and everyone we knew ended up showing up. It was rather strange. First it was Valerie and her roomate, then Annie and her boyfriend, and we all talked about our lives and such. I realized that I hadn’t seen them since I was dating Terry, so I got to recount that saga again.

After they left, Christen and I had a really good talk, and I realized more than ever how much I missed her. We’re going to hang out at Arden Fair today after I get out of class (just like old times).

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that the Internet is alive. And these days, it seems to be filled with elements hostile to me. Strange, taciturn people instant message you…eerie, rambling emails from strangers… it’s like in Neuromancer, where the hard-core Internet jockeys could feel it when Wintermute became sentient.

Except ten times more tawdry. Like if Wintermute’s function was to be a Russian pornospam bot. You know that’s going to be the first computer that reaches sentience, by solving tougher and toucher CAPCHAS to post pornospam.

It’s 11:30. I should probably start my taxes.

I’m outside one of the buildings at Sac State, waiting for Mario. He’s at an appointment of some sort. I’m not quite sure why I came here. I thought they had free wi-fi, but apparently you have to be a student to use it.

Which I don’t have a problem with, but it sucks ’cause I will be a student here in like a year.

And until then, no Internetness. Today is the first nice day in a while. It’s so warm I can start wearing suits again :)

I even drove here all the way on my scooter in just my suit, with no jacket. The campus is warm but breezy, squirrels flitting here and there. Peaceful and tranquil. It’s going to be strange to start going to school here. Any change takes a while to get used to.

I spent all Sunday doing my algebra homework, and I’m pretty well caught up, I just need to do the two equations two unknowns application problems. I think the two unknowns problems are easier, actually.

Sac State is a real college. I’d always dreamt of going to a real college. And soon it will be a reality.

It’s almost surreal. Well, just as surreal as it was the first few months of living in Sacramento. The adjustment to 24-hour coffee shops, public transit, and being two hours from San Francisco.

Strange.

I don’t know what we’re going to do today, but it should be fun. I got my new iPod battery this morning and installed it. Now I’ll be able to watch videos on mah pod for as long as I desire (it’s supposed to have 25% more capacity than the factory-installed battery). W00t for listening to music all day at work and not having to plug it in! I don’t want to know how many charge cycles I went through on that thing. I used to watch full movies on it. Probably at least 1.5 charge cycles a day. Over two years, that builds up.

Today seems like a day fraught with possibilities. There are all these problems with the website. It’s our hosting company. They aren’t even responding to my emails. I’m so sick of cheap-ass hosting. I’m going to tell them we need to spring for a virtual private server or rackspace of our own. Yeah, it’s expensive, but fuck, how are we supposed to build a compelling website if it’s down 50% of the time.

I was going to call them when I was here, but the Internet thing happened. Oh well. Well, Mario’s here, so I should go.

+++TIMETRAVEL++

Now I’m outside of Brian’s work, waiting for him to get off. Mario and I walked around Sac State, got lunch, and he ditched his class. We jogged from his place to McKinley Park and jogged around the park three or four times, then we walked back. I could have jogged a lot more, but Mario was worn out. I guess all my exercise pays off.

I’m in love with my new iPod battery after using it while we jogged, Mario’s iPhone died while my pod kept chugging along…it’s like I have a brand new iPod.

The security guard just kicked me out of the inside of the mall, now I’m on a bench outside.

Having a laptop is so surreal. I keep thinking of those super drugged out writers using typewriters in Naked Lunch…I wonder what their psychosis would have resembled had they used computers instead of typewriters.

Dreams of robot assimilation, software calculating the trajectories of mass destruction. Brian and I are going to make food and watch a pulp gay interest movie. I kinda want to watch Rififi, but I don’t think he likes black and white movies. That and I don’t know if it will be good.

I’m alone in the chilly gloom outside the abandoned mall. This place is the ultimate set for some kind of dystopian movie. I need a DV camcorder.

Can’t get the new M.I.A. album out of my head…I hated it when it came out because it was such a departure from Arular (the first one), but now I’m ok with it. It’s very Bollywood.

I should be afraid…using my laptop in such a place. But I can’t live my life in fear.

Must keep telling myself: things are left unstolen because of the social contract, not because of keys and locks.

My grandma locks our flimsy front door with three different locks. It’s so damn ridiculous. We have a fucking sliding glass door! Bitch, if someone wanted to get in, it’s not going to be hard. God damn.

I could break down our front door if I really wanted to. America is so obsessed with our thousands of locks and isolating ourselves from each other. I’m sick of this place, but I fear that I am too American to blend in anywhere else.

+++TIMETRAVEL++

Now I’m back home. Brian and I had dinner, we made this amazing spinach pasta and read this blog called Stuff White People Like. It was fucking hilarious and so true.

I can’t tell you guys how many people this article reminded me of.

We started watching stuff on the E! channel and like two hours later we realized it was like 1 o’clock. TV sucks your life away. When I got home there was this huge dog outside growling at me. I gave it the “if you bite me I will fucking kill you with my bare hands” look and managed to get inside before it tried anything. I really would have fucking killed it.

I’ve said this for years: I will kill any dog that bites me.

I’m back home and don’t want to go to work tomorrow. I’ll have to face all the problems with the hosting and deal with changing the way our internal email works.

Gah. I need to sleep.

Mario and I went to San Francisco this weekend.

We had a lot of fun. We went to the Museum of modern Art and saw some really amazing sculptures, photographic prints, and video installations.

This is one of the installations, this was a tunnel four stories or so up. They told us to stop taking pictures.

The weather was so perfect. Warm, but not overly so. We walked around Union Square for a while, did some shopping, meandered down to Haight Street, walked around Golden Gate Park.

We stopped at Amoeba Records and I got two CDs: Luxxury - Rock And Roll is Evil and Felix Da Housecat - Devin Dazzle and the Neon Fever.

They had a bunch of albums I really wanted, like Crossover‘ Fantasmo and Amon Tobin’s Foley Room, but they were all like $15. The ones I bought were a super bargain though.

I don’t remember much of the trip. It was a sunny, wonderful trip that just seemed to slip through our fingers. But in a great way.

We visited the San Francisco Apple Store and manhandled the MacBook Air. I want one SOOOO bad!

We had great pizza at the Haight, boarded the BART, and were back on the road to Sacramento before we could blink. There were things that we wanted to do (like this film festival Mario wanted to go to) and this concert (that ended up being $70), but we covered most of the bases and had a great time.