I’m typing this on Dragon NaturallySpeaking inside of VMWare… I mean, I really liked MacSpeech Dictate, but there is absolutely nothing built in to the software to allow you to to correct its mistakes.

It could be the best program in the world in terms of accuracy, but you can’t fix its mistakes without typing… which is just bad for my wrists. With Dragon NaturallySpeaking, even if the thing types an entire sentence wrong I can go and correct each word with voice commands.

I’ve been having so much fun this week. On Tuesday, I had my marathon painting class until 10:30 p.m., and then rendezvoused with Mario to go to Lipstick. I was hesitant to go, it but then it just kind of hit me that I’m not a 13-year-old girl and I can be around people that I don’t respect without making a big scene about it. After all, going to the club is about having fun, not dramatic bullshit.

I ran into Conor at school on Tuesday, I guess he has the math class right before mine with the same teacher. I rather like my math class, we’re studying probability right now. I just did my online homework and found out the probabilities of events that I would never have been able to conceive of two weeks ago.

I’ve been flipping through the other Jean Baudrillard book I got while I was in New York, Cool Memories, which is excerpts from his diaries. They are downright prophetic. Here’s one of the interesting ones I read today:

They estimate it cost $25 million to prepare the World Trade Center attack. The budget for a future film of the same event is put at $250 million.

Fiction is far more expensive than reality.

I’ve been meaning to start Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but I’ve been instant messaging all day. It’s such a waste of time, yet barring some kind of data catastrophe I’m going to basically have a record of every conversation I’ve ever had with anyone. I’m hoping to make it some kind of interactive exhibition in the year 2025. Art is endlessly self-referential anyway.

On Friday I got a message from this guy named Crash (real name is Josh but I know like five Joshes so I’m just calling him his MySpace name for clarity). We traded messages on my lunch break, and he invited me to Old Ironsides on Saturday for this DJ night that a friend of his was doing.

After I got home, I logged on to AIM and I started chatting with him and a few other people. Over the course of the night nearly everyone I knew logged on… it was really cool to have this sort of panel discussion about what they were doing with all of my friends. I even talked with Patrick who never signs on. Crash and I ended up talking until like 5 a.m.

Saturday was a good day… I woke up rather late, and went to get a haircut. After that, I got ready to go over to Mario’s house (we had planned to watch this Jean-Luc Godard movie). It was pretty crazy… all about the character played by Anna Karina becoming a hooker. It was really odd… she kept asking everyone she saw for 2000 francs… and by the end of the movie is she would’ve just asked each person for like 10 francs she would have had at least 3,000 45 minutes into the movie.

I was hoping for a more creative plot that focused more on Godard’s notions of love. He seems fixated on this kind of neo-gangster thriller movie, and I don’t see that as his strength at all.

After that, Mario and I biked over to the Safeway on Howe and got dinner (I don’t eat out, I pick up fruit and baked goods from grocery stores). There was this gaggle of frat boys and sorority girls that were checking out at the same time as us… and it was just really depressing (disturbing?) that this was what their lifestyle entailed. Men making lame jokes at flirty yet stuck-up girls. No wonder our society has a one-way ticket to destruction with the grown-up versions of people like that at the helm.

So of course I insisted on talking to Mario about how tedious straight people are.

We biked back to his place and started this Almodovar movie. Crash called me, and I headed down to this place that he was at downtown while Mario headed to the Merc to meet some of his friends.

Over drinks, Crash and I talked about our mutual friend from back in the day (Sacramento is so weird… you end up knowing everyone). Turns out Crash was intimately involved in this situation regarding Patrick, back in like 2003.

I finished off my drink, and we piled into one of his friends’ cars to go to old Ironsides. The music was a bit too EBM for my taste, but they did play all the classics (The Cure, Depeche Mode, the Smiths, and even the Presets). I spent a lot of the time outside talking with the people there, which was fun. We were pretty trashed and taking crazy pics.

After the music was over, he invited me to this house party at his friend’s place near ARC. Oddly enough, it was like three blocks away from where Kelly and Christen used to live. The first person I was introduced to was *drumroll* Nicole.

Nicole, if you don’t know, was Kelly’s friend in high school. It was really strange… Nicole and I had this conversation about how Kelly really changed once she got out of high school and became this raging bitch. She also told me that Jared went into a mental institution. So crazy.

I left at about 5:30 a.m. and actually had a pretty good night’s sleep. I had this dream where I was exploring the Metro system of some other city that I had never been to before and I kept meeting all of these people that I knew… and in the dream they were all actual people that I had ran into in the past year, like the girl that I ran into at the Presets concert.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do the rest of today… I wanted to go downtown and draw people at True Love, but it’s dark now, so I might go for a little jog and then go over to Crash’s. He’s trying to invite me to the Rage…which normally I would scoff at, but really, I’m leaving this town in December, so I don’t think I’ll be living down the ignominy of it for very long.

We went into the city for the information session at Parsons, which was very informative.

There was a farmers’ market going on in Union Square, with all sorts of organic bread, goat cheese, vegetables, etc. from upstate New York. We had a snack at the Starbucks, and walked across the plaza to this enormous, five-floor Barnes and Noble.

I found two novellas/essays by my Jean Baudrillard, who I adore and can never find anything by him in regular bookstores. I got Passwords and Cool Memories V. I also picked up Albert Camus’ The Fall. I always wanted to read it, but I have so much respect for Camus that I’m almost hesitant to read any more of his essays/novels. I wish they would have had The Myth of Sisyphus, but I didn’t see it.

I completely identify with Baudrillard’s view of society as an empty exchange of symbols removed from any meaningful context. His views of consumerism really jive with Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideas in Nausea (in fact, he mentions Nausea in Passwords) about the equivalence of existence consumer objects claim versus our own personal existences.

Tonight (actually, in a few minutes), we’re leaving for my aunt Gail’s house about an hour south. New Jersey Turnpike, here I come. It was so great being back in New York, taking the subway. I rode the Q train for the first time :)

I hope to blow through those two novellas on the car ride down…or hopefully they’ll be too abstruse…it’s Baudrillard’s specialty.

I don’t know what the point of tonight is.

July 29, 2008.

The first day of the rest of your life.

Fuck this shit.

My phone is cooing at me to recharge it. Switch to offline mode. It’s incredible how long a phone can stay alive when the radio is turned off. Same with people.

I’ve put off washing my clothes for like two weeks… today was the day I had to break down… out of socks.

I went to Arden fair today to find some kind of a backpack thing to take with me on my trip. I got a Puma bag. I mean, it wasn’t the super stylish one I wanted, but the super stylish one would have required a whole new outfit to pull off carrying it.

It’s weird… I’ve been talking to Drew a lot the past few days. I got really trashed at Christen’s and ended up instant messaging him… and then he ended up talking to me like last night while he was totally trashed. I don’t know what it is about that guy… he makes me feel very strong positive and negative feelings.

It sucks I blew my chance with him, but I just didn’t awaken the same kind of feelings he made me feel. That and I’m impatient as fuck, duplicitous, and mainly concerned with my own happiness.

Most of the time I feel like I’m waiting for Vaughan and the car-crash that I am inevitably moving towards with every day.

“The car-crash was the first real thing that had happened to me in years.”

I know day in about 20 years that will be so true. Just working this month full-time I feel completely and utterly exhausted. If I was doing something that I actually liked all that time, maybe it would be okay… but that’s such a tall order. when I’ve been doing web design for like four days in a row I want a change and to write something… and then three days into writing things my brain is mush and I can’t crank anything out anymore.

Doing the exact same thing for eight hours every day… it seems like a fate worse than death. I’m going to do the college thing, get my degree in the thing that I want, and try to get a job at it. If that doesn’t work out, I can always be an organic farmer in upstate New York, I guess.

I’m in the car outside my house. It’s my only place I can do voice-recognition. I only have 14% battery.

This MacBook is a year old, and I used to go through at least two charge cycles a day.

The people next door to turn on their light. I wonder if they can hear me.

Keith brags about all this insanely good sex he’s having. What do I have to show for anything?

But then again, Keith has an insatiable sex drive. I’d probably have AIDS by now if I was him.

I’m so sick of living here. I’m so sick of all my friends.

I wasn’t writing because I wanted to keep it all inside… to pretend that everything was okay. As soon as I touch pen to paper… my mouth to a microphone… everything goes to shit.

I can’t keep it inside. I don’t know whether that makes me weaker or stronger than everyone else. I used to have a short list of people who if they called me and asked me to run away with them that I would.

Christen would talk about how depressed she was, and in the back of my mind I knew if she called me and told me she was going to kill herself I would quit my job and we would go on some kind of insane road trip (this was pre-$4/gallon gas).

Now I have no idea what would make her happy. While I was at the mall I ran into Maria (whom I LOVE!), one of Christen’s old coworkers, and talked old times.

I just wish I could make her happy somehow… but it all has to come from within. She needs to be Marla again. she was just so incredible… she had all of her loves…zombies… Sylvia Plath… Bjork…and then it all got thrown out the window with Allen.

One of the main reasons that she stopped talking to me was she thought that I thought she was lame. I must admit, when I think back on it, I scoffed at her plans to live in a shipping container…and many other HorseCow-esque things. I scoffed at those things because those weren’t Christen things. Those were HorseCow things. She talks about how insincere and unfriendly the people are to her there now that she’s not with Allen (they’re kinda sorta halfway back together), and I want to say “Um…that’s exactly how I felt every time I came over and you weren’t around. Like I was a stranger trespassing somewhere.

I know I’m digging up old shit, but you can’t just build a skyscraper over landfill. I want us to be okay with things, because no matter what’s going on, the neon light is on in the most abandoned storeroom in the back of my mind.

“WHEN IS SHE GOING TO IGNORE YOU AGAIN”

I don’t mean this to be an indictment of you at all, Christen, because I love you dearly, I’m just trying to flush out any demons. Not talking about things is how this whole mess started. I want you to be happy.

So, the short list, in no particular order.

1) Patrick.

I love Patrick. And no matter how often he’s fucking his boyfriend that he’s been with for a year or so, I still am totally head over heels in love with him. But..let’s face facts. He wouldn’t move to Sacramento to be with me, and I wasn’t willing to move to Oklahoma. He helped me get over Adrian, which was the crisis of my life, and I am eternally in debt to him. He’s got the heart strings tied up in bows.

2) Drew.

I don’t know what it is about the guy, but he just gives me that funny feeling in your chest where you just want to hug them and grit your teeth at a faux pas of theirs at the same time. If he showed up at my house breathless, splattered in blood, and packing a handgun, I’d throw the MacBook in a duffel bag and follow him to the ends of the earth.

3) Terry.

This one is more hard to pin down…I remember distinctly the weeks after the breakup, the hurried lunches at the Downtown Plaza where I was fighting with myself tooth and nail to not hold him and kiss him. But now that seems but a dream. We are argumentative, and although we are compatible in other ways, his chameleon-ness and the way he jumps from “friend” to “friend” scares me.

4) By now I’ve nearly forgotten about Alex. I’m sure he’s forgotten about me. He moved away from San Francisco. My dreams of a sunlit Ocean Beach love affair are gone.

5) I felt “in love” with Zero for about a week. After that, it was just a rush to keep up appearances and hope that the feeling would return.

6) The last person I can really think of is Adrian…and I have to say, time mends all wounds. We were talking last week and I was thinking to myself “oh, I’m bored, we should hang out” and then the whole relationship like flashed back through my head. Eh, maybe not. But we do have a staggering amount of interests in common.

Oh yeah,

7) Andrew.

I’ve been resisting my impulse to call him for…well…ever since I stopped talking to him. It wasn’t intentional, I just didn’t have anything to say, and then it became a week, a month…

Despite all my posturing, all we have in common is that puppy love feeling I get when I’m around him. And, of course, I refuse to admit that his beard was a really big turnoff.

It seems I used to have all these deep-seated issues regarding my exes and nowadays it seems like it’s all burned off or has sunk imperceptibly below the surface. The thing I feel most bad about is my not feeling anything.

I desperately wanted to talk on the phone today, but I couldn’t really think of anyone to call other than my mom. That doesn’t mean I didn’t call everyone anyway.

I hate being the needy friend who has nothing to talk about but ennui. I actually did have a few conversation topics, but not ones that really involve anyone else.

Got a new backpack for my trip at Puma, scored a FireWave (that I’ve been wanting forever), they’re phasing it out so I got the $99 device for $20 including shipping. It’ll allow me to use my Mac for surround sound through my speakers.

Which I am getting back before I leave. Or else.

I feel like I’m in this incestuous circle of friends where all of my friends are my exes and they’re all fucking each other.

Christen says I should cut them all off…but what good would that do? Go from a few insincere friends to no friends at all? I can’t be dependent on her to be my only friend, that’s weird and selfish.

And Chris is moving to L.A.

The only person I could trust for advice.

It’s a good thing I’m leaving.

Some days I wish it was forever. Unfortunately, I’m too poor to satiate my every unhappiness with money.

If I could, I’d be far, far away. Or so I think.

Watched The Last Starfighter tonight for the first time. It was ok.

Read about Eugene Ionesco, transgressive fiction, Grove Press, obscenity trials. I want to read a thousand novels. Maybe I should do that.

I need something insane to happen…a zombie attack, a nuclear bomb blast…I feel like I’m becoming complacent, comfortable, stupid, and empty.

I bought my Cut Copy / Presets tickets today. That’s one reason to live, right? Man, it’s 1 a.m.

My wrists are killing me, I have to sleep. They’ll be killing me all day tomorrow. Hello, full-time employment.

Today was made for the river. Heaven is driving back home on a scooter, in 100+ degree weather gloriously air conditioned by wet clothes from the river.

A morning picnic on a bench at McKinley park

Chelsea lamping it up at the beginning of our movie shoot (we never did shoot anything)

River time.

River Ghosts I-IV

Beginning of a new painting, it’s Magritte’s The Lovers in halftone.

I feel like mending fences, talking to exes. But that’s not a good idea. Or is it? Wanting to fuck your exes doesn’t mean you have to like them. It would be more frustration than it’s worth.

My wrists have been killing me lately and even doing voice-rec I have to edit the posts somewhat which kills my wrists. So there will be more photoblogs. But but but I have my 5 megapixel N95, so it won’t be so terrible, right?

4th of July

Amazing view from Megan’s relative’s house in SF.

Our 4th of July feast

Christen, Steve, Megan, and I took Muni down to the wharf to watch fireworks.

even earlier

Me as a zombie in Megan and Steve’s movie.

I just haven’t had much to write about lately. I guess it’s my birthday tomorrow, so I should at least make an attempt to write something. Today I went to work and it was completely uneventful. Afterwards I went home and did more math. I went up to Brookings for my class, but I was like an hour late (my dad made me wash the dishes), and the teacher wasn’t actually going to be there, so I went over to Fred Meyer and sat in my car in the parking lot, brainstorming about anything I could possibly need. Every time I go up to Brookings I always make the pilgrimage to Fred Meyer, because it’s the closest thing to a real department store. Hell, it’s the only department store for 100 miles. And for the record, Wal-Mart doesn’t count. Anyway, I don’t know why I even mention Wal-Mart. It ruins the reverie of this anecdote. Eventually I decided that I needed a poster frame for my Power Mac G5 poster I got on eBay. No matter what I do with this software, it will not recognize the word G5. It always types “gee five,” no matter how many times I correct it. To tell the truth, it’s incredibly infuriating. I would curse, but it doesn’t recognize that either. It’s like the damn FCC built into my computer. I can only say curse words that can be heard on daytime television. But that’s beside the point. So I fired up my iPod and made my way to the glory that is Fred Meyer.

I noticed immediately that there was something totally different. They finished all the remodeling, and it looks exactly like the stores in Sacramento and New Jersey with all the fake columns and such. It was eerie. I could almost close my eyes and pretend that I was in the delicious suburban Hell of Sacramento, or that I was strolling along the billions of random shopping centers around where my mom lives. They even installed a Starbucks. Weird, huh?

They had some really beautiful poster frames, but they were $15. I’m only getting one if this poster is in beyond mint condition, which the buyer assured me it was. We’ll see. And I couldn’t remember offhanded dimensions of my poster, so dejectedly I started for the electronics section. I browsed the iPod accessories until I got bored (they now have the iPod car charger I bought in Eureka in stock) and walked around the aisles until one thing caught my eye: noise cancelling headphones. I had been browsing the Internet for noise canceling headphones for a while, but I had been very indecisive. Luckily they were having a sale and I picked them up for 40 bucks. They have little microphones on the sides of the earphones that pick up the ambient noise and then invert the sound wave of what is played in your ears so that it turns out perfect sound. It’s not exact, but it cuts down on the background noise of my computer 90% or so. I never noticed how loud the eight or so fans in my computer tower were until I had the noise canceling headphones on for a while and then took them off. Two words: wind tunnel.

The main reason I got them was so that I could listen to my music over the drone of my dad’s diesel engine in his truck when we make the seven-hour trek to Sacramento next week. And I have a feeling that they will perform superbly.

In other news, Molly and I are supposed to have lunch tomorrow. I’m so excited! I guess one of the things that I hate about myself is that it’s very easy for me to get inured to things. For one, I have absolutely no friends in Crescent City that I can relate to. And it doesn’t even bother me anymore. Nobody understands my jokes, no one gets my literary references… the one thing that really pops into my mind was on me, Misty, and Katelyn’s trip to Eureka. I started playing Technologic (the Peaches remix) and was saying how it was like my favorite song ever (not really true, but hey…) and Misty was all “It’s just all tech stuff!” In case you haven’t heard it, lyrics here.

Even though I was driving at the time, I immediately had a flashback to that scene in Ghost World where Seymor and his girlfriend are at a garage sale and the girlfriend goes “oh, you can get that, it’ll go great with your old stuff!” (he collects these incredible antiques). It was the moment when he realized that he would rather be alone than with someone who didn’t understand him. I don’t really have that feeling towards Misty, because it’s not her fault that her tastes aren’t identical to mine, but still… I can’t help but feel like Seymour, knowing that no one will ever understand him. I guess that sort of ridiculous, but I live in a different world than everyone else and in this cesspool of drugs, teen pregnancy, and minimum-wage jobs, nobody can see the beauty I see when I close my eyes. Nobody else in Crescent City spends their free time re-creating every last surface of the Guggenheim from memory just reserve one last bastion of beauty in this disgusting hive. *shudder of revulsion*

Okay, I’m done. I guess I’m just a bad mood tomorrow because it’s my birthday and I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything in my life. I guess I just have to listen to my mom. It took her 40 years to get her math done. So what if it takes me another year. But I feel like Kelly’s just going to move on without me and do all those cool bonding life-changing experiences that I want to do. And then I’ll be all alone. I always play around with visual art because I’m drawn to express something that can’t be expressed in words… and then once I finally do express it, I feel like I’m done. I used to draw a few years ago and one of the very last things I drew was this gigantic cage and this minuscule little figure in the bottom… and that’s just what I was trying to get at. The enormity of everything that isn’t me… all the tribal crap with football and churches, the politics, the games that mean nothing, the fights for nothing, everyone misleading everyone else do so they don’t have to admit that their lives are meaningless, all the lies, all the bullshit, all the drama, I’m just so bored and alone in it. I can’t be like Ben. I’m the person that I am. And I can’t just slip in and out of whatever personality is fashionable at the moment. A lot of the time I’m jealous of the people that can do that. But then again I realize that I have spent so much time alone that I’ve studied the person who I feel that I am and the way that I want to live my life and I don’t think they’ve ever given it a second thought. Not talking to anyone but your coworkers and your mother for months on end does something to you. It hardens you. You have to believe in your philosophy of life for you kill yourself. For Misty, suicide is easy. One drink after another, one party after another, random sex, party, drive drunk, party, more sex…girls, girls, girls. She’s running from something. It’s obvious. It’s the same thing my grandmother’s running from. I would say, but it was told to me in confidence…or drunkenness, I can’t remember. With her it’s all the same.

I just keep alienating my friends one by one because they don’t hold up to my standards. They can just turn off their minds and have fun. I can only do that after I’ve turned it on. For the somnambulists, this is the way they’ll always be. I keep judging, and they keep ignoring me. Maybe someday there will be somebody that I never say bad things about in my blog, but I haven’t met them yet. Except for Molly and Kelly.

So that’s why I’m glad I’ll be seeing two of my favorite people within the span of a week. Woohoo!

I got another of my cool T-shirts I ordered on eBay today. It’s hella cool. I’m going to wear it tomorrow. I mean today. Ah, hour one of my birthday and I’m not exactly happy. I learned from doing the comics page today that I share a birthday with Owen Wilson. Whoa, I just surfed a b-day site and I share a b-day with many more people than that:

Mickey Mouse
William Gilbert (wrote Lord of the Flies, right? I’m too lazy to Google it)
Margaret Atwood
Chloe Sevigny
Kim Wilde

That’s sort of cool. Niels Bohr died on my b-day. That’s also sorta cool.

OMG! On November 18 in the year 1307, William tell shot the apple off of his son’s head. Sweet! In 1776, Hessians captured Fort Lee, NJ. My Aunt lives there. Antarctica was discovered on my birthday as well. Cool. I love the Internet.

I guess what I’m saying is that I feel like I should be happier than I am. I mean, my mom sent me this big box full of presents and I got my cool t-shirt from eBay…I should be enjoying every moment of my life. There was even a brand-new family guy on tonight. It distresses me that I’m becoming a malcontent like my father. Eh, screw that. I did an iPod dance with my new headphones. My dad will never/has never done an iPod dance. The only thing I know about his past was that he did meth and drank a lot. Lame. I wonder if I’m going to take my computer with me to Sacramento. Kelly says she doesn’t have an extra monitor, so I doubt I’ll bring it. Damn I want a laptop! Apple had better come out with those Intel-based PowerBooks in January like Appleinsider says, or I’m going to be pissed.

Well, I guess that’s all to report. More unfulfilled expectations, as usual. But that’s life.

PS: I can’t stop thinking about that movie Pink Flamingoes. It was SOOO funny/disturbing! She actually eats a dog turd at the end! I almost burst out laughing thinking about the part where the house rejects them. “Like only a mother can!” LOL. You simply must watch it. It’s INCREDIBLY disturbing and graphic though. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.