You know, it’s great being here.

My cousins Alexis and Nicholas went to the beach with us today and we had a wonderful time playing in the water. When we got back, Alexis was playing with my Bluetooth keyboard and I was teaching her how to make smiley faces and such…cute memories since it seems like she was born yesterday.

Before I turn around, she’s going to be a teenager and will be in her own little world. I wish I was here to counteract the propaganda about “god” they’re feeding her, and to be kind of an older brother figure to them.

We went to Dearborn Farms, this kind of indie Whole Foods. It’s like a supermarket…but they grow most of the produce on-site. We got some plants in the nursery and took cute pictures.

But the thing is…

I can’t sleep because I have to sleep on this damn couch. Back at my mom’s place, I have a pullout bed that’s very comfortable…I just have a hard time sleeping, it’s not my bed.

I haven’t had sex in three weeks, and have no privacy here.

It’s great visiting, but I think that if anything, I’m going to have to live on-campus if I go to Parsons. Fuck this shit of having implicit rules on your behavior. I can deal with these restrictions while I’m here, but the last week is always a struggle to maintain my game face.

Spending time with my cousins is great and I wish I could do it more often, but I want to be able to do it on my time, the way I want. I want to be able to have a boyfriend and not be in the closet (everyone knows except my grandma…my mother doesn’t tell her “because she will be so afraid of me getting AIDS.”) Yeah…it ain’t just a river in Egypt.

My life is in California, until I can afford a job to support me and these astronomical rents in this area. The area where my aunt lives in South Jersey (it’s more like the upper middle, but anywhere outside the “suburbs” (the area within commuting distance to New York City) is South Jersey. We were taking the back roads to the beach, and I could have sworn I was in New England. Huge, sprawling houses that were incredibly old. Rumson, one of the little towns we passed through (it’s this endless forest dotted with mansions) was settled in 1662.

Just back from Wikipedia, apparently Rumson is one of the wealthiest towns in New Jersey, with a fast commuter ferry to downtown Manhattan. The beach that we went to, Sea Bright, if you walk up to the north end, you can see the skyscrapers of Manhattan on a clear day (which we could today without even walking north).

I’m just blown away by the size and grandiose nature of the houses. This is where the people that milked millions out of Bear Stearns live. It’s so insane. It just kind of dawned on me…if you start a war in the Middle East to pad your stock portfolio…you never see it. You stay in your beautiful house surrounded by 200 other beautiful homes, and never have any contact with the real world.

These houses are California’s wet dream of what it could become…there were some new homes, and they looked horribly out of place. This place just exuded money and privelege…it was like driving through a museum.

Very surreal.

But yeah…this no sex thing just isn’t cutting it. In many ways, I can’t wait for my trip home. I’m going to be crying on the drive to the airport, but come on…sex is awesome!

God, I had to explain to my mom what a “twink” was when we were shopping at the Garden State Plaza.

*shudder*

My wrists are killing me but the braces are in the car…I want to txt or call people, but I accidentally left my phone in Alexis’s room when I was reading her a story…so I’m fucked. I’m going to lie back on this fucking uncomfortable couch and try, try, try to get to sleep.

Even though the kids woke me up at 8 am this morning, still can’t sleep. Curse you, whoever made this lumpy piece of shit couch that probably cost an obscene amount of money (my uncle used to work on the NY Stock Exchange).

This is like a kind of live-in vacation, learning the cultures of another, foreign land of money and privilege through condescending tirades about the evils of the pretentious rich people that live around here (voiced by my aunt, of course). I like her so much more since they fell off their high horse and had to deal with not having much money.

There was this scene a few years ago where we were driving around looking for the perfect shades for her incredibly expensive dining room (which is never used now, by the way, with its immaculately upholstered chairs and dusty linen tablecloth sitting behind the aforementioned shades in darkness). We hit like three different drape stores while my aunt Gail waxed poetic about the perfect dining room, while I tried to explain what the passage of the Patriot Act meant for civil liberties. She wouldn’t believe me.

My, how times have changed.

Thank the gods. And thank the gods that it’s Wednesday (it’s 12:28 a.m. and everyone else in the house is asleep). Only three more days to go. I leave super early on Sunday so that doesn’t really count as a day.

I’m so torn between my California life and a life here…my mom is very optimistic I’ll get into Parsons…I’m more skeptical. I’m going to hone my portfolio with the Academy of Art advisers before I submit it to Parsons in September.

I was talking to Josh, and he gave me this huge song and dance about how San Francisco is a cesspool of drug addicts, homeless, and HIV positive people. I am sure that’s true (as it is with every major city), but it made me very apprehensive about living in SF (a city I’ve despised for a long time). But if it has to be done, I’ll do it. Take one for the team, right?

But if I do get into Parsons, it’s going to be incredible. There were so. many. hot. guys. just hanging around the Union Square area in NY, ’cause there’s like four colleges in a 10-block area. They probably all have HIV though. So depressing. The barista in the Union Square Starbucks hit on me though, which was encouraging.

I don’t know, some days I feel like my entire life is this elaborate game to avoid getting HIV. Heck, look at my domain name. Retroviruses, see also: HIV. That’s why I picked it.

Well, all the heavy stuff aside, I should try to get to sleep. fucking lumpy couch…a pox on your house, Jennifer Convertibles / Ashley HomeStore / Lay-Z-Boy / Pottery Barn.