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.

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.

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 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.

I just finished cleaning my room. It’s incredibly clean. I even did my bi-annual vacuuming. I unpacked all the boxes, threw out a bunch more trash, and put everything I’m not using in the closet. I don’t know why I decided to clean today, it just seemd to happen. My homunculus willed it, I guess. I was dancing around to cool music earlier in my 5 square feet of floor space that wasn’t covered with my stuff, but now that I have a gigantic dance floor I just feel tired and vaguely hungry. I was trapped work until like 4 p.m., so I wasn’t able to register for school today. I must do it before I have to go to work or just won’t get done since I seem to be saying there so much longer nowadays. I have one of my cool things I make on the front of tomorrow’s paper. Anyway, I want to show you guys something, I should go get my digital camera. Oh good, it was just in my backpack. When I was cleaning, I found some really cool stuff from ages past, like my incredible obsession with making chain mail, circa 1999. I found this gigantic piece of mail (gigantic due to the tedious work involved to make it) that I had made myself from a spool of wire and some wire cutters purchased expressly for that purpose. This was my result:

I always was sad because I didn’t have enough money to get a bunch of professionally-cut rings to make myself a suit of mail. Now I think I’m going to check it out.

I really really want my iPod, but I also really want that $20 student discount. I know it sounds like an insignificant amount of money, but with the amount that I used to work, I would make that much in about a day. So to me it’s a day’s worth of work that I’m saving.

Anyway, I took a picture of my newly designed computer alcove, complete with TV hooked up to my computer, the woofer from my surround sound system strategically placed in the center, and of course Navarre, my computer, who is looking lame in this pic but is really cool. The setup looks hella tight in person. Trust me.

Ben said he’s going to call me tomorrow. It would be cool to do something, although I have to work that night. I’m listening to an album by this band called Lacquer, it’s pretty nondescript electronic-ish music. It’s kinda like Fischerspooner. Kinda like if you look at two fractals, you’re certain that they’re both fractals, but they do look quite different, but it’s impossible to quantify in words how one fractal is different from another. That’s kind of the difference.

I totally failed at my governing duty last night in my latest Caesar III assignment. I had all this unemployment, so I built schools, libraries, academies, theaters and amphitheaters to get my culture rating up, but I neglected my prosperity rating and now I have this incredible need for workers, but the province doesn’t have enough farmland to increase the population anymore. So I have a workforce of 1,800 with 700 needed. And the citizens need pottery if they’re going to become patricians, and I have no workforce to make the pottery…so I’m stuck at 45 prosperity when I need 50. It’s infuriating. I’m going to have to build the whole goddamn city from scratch again. Either that or take the military assignment instead. The military provinces are usually much much bigger than the provinces in which you must demonstrate your finesse with governing.

Every other time I played the game I would always take the cities where I had to maintain immense armies, but I decided to take the other route this time. I thought it would be cool, but it’s just annoying. I would rather have the Celts or the Goths destroy one of my cities quickly, my legions mauled by charioteers and trampled with elephants, than to be stuck in the purgatory of the 45 prosperity rating. One time I had to build guard towers all over my city (hundreds of them) and use every single legion to defeat this one immense army. By the end of the battle the city would be halfway destroyed, but I would be victorious because the ballistas from the towers would take out all of the elephants and straggler bettalions not killed by my legions.

I’m really hungry. I need to make some food.

I bought the VCR in order to turn all my mom’s old home movies into DVDs, but my video card doesn’t support video input. That will come in my new system, but I wanted to take the first step. Now I’m watching this “best songs of 2001″ VH1 thing that I don’t think I taped. I hope I didn’t tape it. I had totally forgotten about Enrique Iglesias.

Omg, I totally forgot about Lenny Kravitz too. Lol, he’s saying something totally lame about his video. I actually liked Kravitz, but his songs get old SO fast. I should download “Dig In” again. I think I liked the video better than the actual song. Hmm.

Not having friends, I can download any kind of music I want, without having to justify it to anybody. I even downloaded (gasp) “Toxic” today.

I feel like I’m inexorably being drawn to music that makes me a cliché person. According to the stereotype, all gay guys like electronic music. I like electronic music. So I’m less of a person and more of a statistic. Eh, I shouldn’t care.

I’ve been wanting to talk about this one thing for a month or so, but could never remember until now. Every day when I get in to work my chair is adjusted about 2 in. higher than I like it. It’s incredibly annoying, and it makes me suspect that somebody uses my computer when I’m not at work. It’s unnerving, to say the least.

I also downloaded some Weezer when I realized that Undone (the sweater song) wasn’t in my music library. I loved Weezer back in the day, but never had the moola to buy any of their CDs. Now I’m rectifying the situation.

Hm. It’s almost eleven. I’ve been trying to watch Family Guy religiously in hopes that I can catch some of the new episodes that they made in 2005, but it seems as if they’re not going to show them again. Well, there’s always a chance. I’m going to buy my iPod as soon as I register for classes, but I am reluctant since it’s about $300, according to the course catalog. I heard that one can pay as much as it costs to go to college of the redwoods there, but I don’t know if that’s true. Perhaps I’ll call the financial aid lady tomorrow. I should go watch Family Guy and make a snack.

There is no ultimate masterplan. I guess I just have to to listen to my audio goddess Miss Kittin for life advice. I just went through my archive of photos and OMG they brought back SO many memories. Oh god, I’ve had SO much fun this year!!!!! All my time in Sacramento and the San Fran trip…god. I wouldn’t take it back for anything. I guess I would have kicked myself a million times harder if I would have gone “Sorry, Kelly, I don’t want to give up my stable job to move in with you and Dan” rather than have said yes and had my dreams dashed by someone that wasn’t me.

It’s just…looking at those pictures, I just felt this amazing love for everybody I’ve ever known. I haven’t felt that in a long time. I’ve retreated into my lair. I need to be more extroverted. Take a class in Brookings. Do something with my life. I’m really sad that that thing with that guy Thomas didn’t work out. Even if he wasn’t cool at least it would’ve been drama. Must delete him from my MySpace. Oh yeah. I was going to start writing again.

I should probably clarify: it’s going to be jejune. It’s going to be banal. Insipid, trite… anything you can hurl at me I will give you wholeheartedly. I just need a fantasy life. And everything is pointless. Whether I spend my life imagining I’m a cyberpunk or imagining I’m doing the work of some imaginary higher being, in the end, it’s all the same. I had this faint inkling of a plot earlier this month, and I think it evaded me. We’ll see.

Step one is getting my old stories on there. I should do that tonight. Nah. I have to put something off to give my life a sense of meaning.

I think I’m going to give in and get an iPod Nano when I get paid. That will definitely be coolness that will go down in history. I need to fucking call Ben. Well, I have like six times and he never returned my calls. Oh well. I definitely need to call Misty.

Oh dear, I had a Freudian slip and said Mindy. For Mindy Fischer, my like best friend ever in the late high school/early college era. I miss her so much, but she got married and moved away and became a different person. I really loved her…like, as more than a friend. We would cuddle for hours. I miss that. We made out one time too. But it totally wouldn’t have worked. All I wanted was a platonic relationship, and she wanted a husband. Correction: a husband so she could have endless amounts of guilt-free married Christian sex.

I think that I would be much more bisexual if society didn’t have us locked down to this either-or crap of HOMO HETERO or BI. Okay, I like guys best, but that doesn’t mean I’m a Kinsey 6. I just never met a chick cool enough after Mindy. I wish I could sink into that bisexual malaise of everything being sexy, but I feel like I have to self-enforce this rigorous religion of homosexuality. I will even delete perfectly good porn if it has one girl in it because I’m afraid someone will eventually see it and go “you’re not gay!” I guess it’s all about being part of a group, or something. It’s much more comforting to be gay, bi, or straight than to be in the anomalous gray area, where everyone really is. I don’t know what got me onto this. I should go to sleep. I miss my friends. I miss everyone and everything.

Oh my God. I just had like the most fun I have had in weeks. My coworker Matt had this party that he invited me to, and we all hung out and ate tuna and talked about all sorts of amazing stuff. I absolutely love Kat, Matt, and Katie. They are so amazingly cool. I hope I meet cool people like them in Sacramento. Me and Kat had this like a really long amazing intellectual conversation which started when she asked me why I believed that life was meaningless. I sort of laughed a bit and had to collect my thoughts because that’s not exactly a question that should be asked after you’ve had a few beers, but we had this could really great talk about like what life means to us and our plans. I miss that so much… being able to talk to people about what really matters and the questions in my life that I think are important.

We talked a lot about the Amanda Barton/Tracy Kau thing, and after a while I was basically in agreement with Kat. Tracy deserved his jail term for doing what he did, but he’s not Charles Manson. I don’t know why the editor of the newspaper is hanging him from the highest tree as if he’s some sort of serial rapist murderer or something. The consensus came to be something like this: Tracy deserved the time he got, but Amanda needs some serious counseling for her obsession with older men. All day long my boss was harping on how evil a person in Tracy was and how much of a victim Amanda was. It was infuriating me to no end. He has no idea about the situation. What a self-righteous bastard. Anyway, Katie’s new apartment is so amazingly sexy. It’s all like Victorian and gigantic. It was so cool, we were all talking about the implications of things like blogs and MySpace and Matt just busted out about what a cool person he thinks I am. And I was so flabbergasted I couldn’t respond with how cool I think he is. And when I had formed the words in my head, the moment was gone. It was unfortunate. But then again, I’m not used to actual conversation. I’m all about the instant messaging. Reality bores me. At least reality in Crescent City bores me.

Anyway, it was just an amazing night and I felt so close to Kat and everybody. I don’t think I’ll ever forget her. Or any of the people at the paper for that matter. It dawned on me tonight how deeply I’m going to miss everybody. But I guess it’s good that most of my good friends already moved away.

I am absolutely stoked (I never use that word) about moving in with my cousin. And I feel a lot more secure about it since I came out of the closet about my plans to my coworkers.

I stole all all of the bottle caps I could get my hands on for Ben. I think I’m going to give him a box of them before I leave. The best presents are from the heart, or some such platitude.

Misty and I hung out last night and cooked food and watched this movie called White Oleander. It was actually a surprisingly good movie. I feel close to Misty again. At that one time that I had left six messages on her machine I wanted to kill her. Now I understand why she was doing what she was doing. And I understand all of the stuff that’s going on with Selena’s boyfriend Josh (the one I know from grade school that I served at DDR). Him and Selena have been going out for a month and already they’re talking about marriage. Misty went out with Josh a long time ago and he used the same lines on her too. I really used to respect Selena a lot more.

I mean, she used to say up and down that he didn’t want a boyfriend and now the first guy she sees she wants to marry. I miss the old Selena. The Selena that would ditch art with me like two years ago and go talk about art and that band OKGo on the quad. I feel like I’m writing her obituary now. Writing obituaries has made me even more cynical (if it’s even possible). I picture my own little block of text. I wonder what it will say. I hope my last blog entry isn’t something retarded, but I’m sure it will be. I hope they put in my URL. That would be friggin’ sweet.

All of my great times at CR seem so bright, so real, and so happy in my memory. I guess I wasn’t really wasting my life away here. But I’m wasting it away now. I will treasure every field trip and cool friend I made. But now is the time to move on. I shouldn’t dwell anymore.

Today I had a few epiphanies, and a lot of fun…but not how I expected. I woke up about two hours earlier than I normally do because my dad was showing the house and I wanted to be sure to be awake and dressed before the imbeciles showed up. It turns out I woke up way too early, but it was a really cool thing because I got to watch an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. My dad gave me a ride to work and I got there about 20 minutes early. I’m glad that I decided to check my cell phone messages, as right when I got there I had missed a call from the auto repair place! Woot. So I went down and picked my car up before work. It runs just as good as before, except for I have to jiggle it around a little bit when I put it in drive because sometimes it doesn’t catch. But that’s all irrelevant.

Anyway, I only works like an hour and a half because almost nothing came in and my boss wasn’t there to ask for anything new to do. And the databases are done. Damn my productivity.

For the record, today fucking rocked. Fast-forward to me at home after work. I had to go up to Brookings to get my cat from the veterinarian, and Ripley was online so I talked to him for a bit and he agreed to come down and watch that movie. It was actually a really well done movie. I was surprised. To the very end I was very interested in the protagonist’s guilt or innocence.

There was road construction on 101, so I took this scenic alternative of sorts called Ocean View Drive. Guys, take this on a sunny day sometime. It is fucking beautiful. Unfortunately, Ripley is about as taciturn as they come… so I rambled on for about 20 minutes about random crap (Misty calling me last night, my efforts to make the x86 version of Mac OS X run on my system, and other stuff. When I was done with my prosaic rambling (when am I ever done?), there was just dead silence. I tried to stimulate conversation, but it was just like before. Nothing. Inside I was crying out “Do even like me? What did what we have mean? Did you just go out with me out of boredom? Why did you dump me for the guy who fights with you 24/7?” but I didn’t say anything. It was probably the last time we would see each other, so I asked him yet again about his plans for the future. He has none. He’s going to live that his abusive ex-boyfriend’s house for the rest of his life. And that’s when I had an epiphany.

I give lip service to all of this philosophy about life meaning nothing and apathy and misanthropy, but this was what apathy gets: someone who doesn’t care about their situation, someone so blase to changing their own situation that they will just waste away their life doing nothing. But I guess if I was a true nihilist then I wouldn’t care because nothing means anything. But I do care. I’m idealistic. I can’t stand people who just throw their lives away. Who do stupid, destructive things. I just have to repeat over and over in my head: the Earth will be destroyed. Everyone I know will die. Nothing will mean anything. We are sustained chemical reactions, nothing more. But I dunno. I need to actually read Nietzche. And I need to read more about what Camus called the “absurd man.” I know I’m just Sisyphus. But I want to roll a cooler rock than everyone else.

Anyway…revelation: I’m a philosophical hypocrite. I wish I had friends smart enough to point such things out. I mean, after knowing someone for like two years you think that you might think that their philosophies were a bit flawed. I was much smarter than Josh. I could bamboozle him in philosophy to beat the band. And with obvious flaws in my logic too. It was like the intellectual equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. I’m sick of that. I would rather get beaten in a philosophical debate then have a hollow victory on shaky logic and impeccable diction.

After I dropped Ripley off in Brookings, I was a bit depressed. It’s really horrible when a relationship ends before you identify all of the flaws in the person that you’re going out with. When it’s all so perfect, it lives on in your mind and you just can’t let that go. At least I can’t. But I’m just needy and lonely. So I went over to Fred Meyer to ogle the iPods and buy myself some socks and toothpaste. It was quite a melancholy chore. I must stop IMing him, we are not right for each other at all. Even as friends. Well, as IM friends we’re fine but IRL we have nothing to talk about. I’m all about the spoken/written language. And he doesn’t like to converse or write. Or read. Must stop maudlin crap. OK. On to the fun part of the day.

Well, when I got home I started packing to get my mind off of everything and actually got a bit done. But I realized I needed trash bags to put all the trash in and I needed to get some litter for my cat because his ear is raw from the sutures being removed and I’m going to have to keep him inside for at least a few more days. So I headed off to Safeway, but I thought I would stop in to the theater and play maybe one round of dance revolution. To my delight, there was this guy there I was pretty good… about a month or two underneath my skill level, but with good stamina. I must confess: I have this fantasy of meeting a hella hot guy (possibly asian) who will kick my ass at DDR and we’ll be all sweaty from the competition and go back to my place and fuck furiously. But that’s just a fantasy…for now. Anywayz…

Me and that guy played for like 30 minutes. I impressed the bystanders by doing Paranoia. There’s just like one or two steps in that song that I just can’t seem to get down. I always pass it, but there is a difference between just passing and kicking ass. Well, to a newbie… passing Paranoia is a momentous achievement. But it’s not momentous to me.

I had a lot of fun playing, but after I was totally exhausted and out of quarters I went over to Safeway to get my kitty litter, Soymilk, and trash bags. Unfortunately/fortunately I met an old friend from high school, Heather. We talked about the old times when we used to hang out at Sunset and gross out our teachers. She’s living in Bakersfield I guess. We swapped numbers. I hate that fake “I’ll call you” thing, but I found myself a smiling hypocrite standing there in that supermarket. I feel a real affinity towards her, but we don’t have anything in common anymore. All of our mutual friends have moved away. Even we have moved away. I just hate being fake, unless I’m getting paid for it.

Well, I got my stuff and got home and was too exhausted to pack. I almost hit a deer on the way home. That was not a happy experience. I’m glad I wasn’t speeding. Well, I felt like I had all of the stuff to blog. And now I really don’t have anything to wrap it up with… except for that the night always heals my frayed nerves.

I’m about 20 pages from finishing Diary. It’s very good, but I can’t help feeling like it’s just… book-TV, for want of a better term. Pesudo-intellectual pulp. But maybe that’s just my mood. It doesn’t really hold together as well as his other works. But what can I say? I’m not as good a writer as Chuck is.

With the thought of moving, I look around my room at these things that have been surrounding me for years… like my big painting. My only painting. I just painted it and never really painted again. It expressed everything I needed to express visually. That and canvases are really expensive. And I never got inspired again.

For the last few days I’ve been playing around with the idea of starting to write fiction again. I sorta have this idea about the character who writes obituaries for a newspaper and everything he buys he only thinks about in terms of the amount of people that need to die for him to buy a certain thing.

My music is skipping what with the voice-recognition and a bunch of other programs I’m running. My processor is chugging along as much as it can, but even with the hyperthreading, the single-core Pentium has limits, even though it’s a 3.0GHz. It’s not sufficient. My machine is officially obsolete. But I’ve had obsolete computers my whole life and loved them to death, so I think that Navarre will have a long life yet to come, until the Intel-based Macs come out. I really hope they rock. Maybe getting that expensive sound card will solve all of these audio issues. With my current plans, I don’t think I’m going to be finding out anytime soon. I can’t believe it. The 14th. I guess it’s what I’ve always wanted, but it involves giving up everything that I have already. Giving up Crescent City. Hmm. I wonder if I’ll miss it.

I’m poor here, and I will be poor in Sacramento. But I would rather be poor there. Already I’m looking around my room picturing what things will fit in the boxes I have and which things will not. I’m wondering if I’ll be able to fit all of my possessions in my car. I’m looking at the titanic pile of DVD ROMs, 5 1/2 inch floppy disks, unwatched DVDs, etc. breeding in the pile beside my computer desk. I’m going to have to sort through everything I own. I feel tired just thinking about it. But I did take a shower and now I feel rejuvenated, even though I don’t know for what. Perhaps I should start packing my books. I do have a few small boxes I could use. Or I should give up. Sleep, and surrender myself to Saturday. Giving up sounds like a good plan. I need some failure to balance out the ostensible success of leaving my dad’s house.

Today sucked. I’m going to owe my Dad $1800. I’m going to have to call the lady at the car repair place tomorrow and tell her that I want the rebuilt transmission with the six-month warranty. I’m going to go to Sacramento and sell it. Pay my dad back. Pocket the difference. Save up for a sweet computer.

I built the computer of my high-end but slightly conservative dreams on alienware.com, and it was around $3500. It had a dual core 3.8GHz processor with hyper threading technology. It supported DDR2, the new hella fast RAM. All sorts of bells and whistles. I can’t afford bells and whistles right now. Although I do have $800 saved up. I talked to my boss today about taking on some more work, and I’m going to do two new tasks, one that I will hate and one that won’t be hard at all. I’m subjecting myself to that task because I want to leave this town so bad.

Hopefully, I will be making about $400 per pay period. That will definitely allow me to move by Nine Inch Nails in September, but I might stay a month or so more just so I can buy myself a Vespa or car or something. Why did this transmission thing have to happen now? Now I effectively don’t have a car. I went to Wal-Mart today got a back pack, a bike lock, and I drink holder for my bike. I’m going to be riding it a lot. My dream is to be able to ride my bike to and from work, even though it is 10 miles each way. I would save about $180 a month, but I’m not sure if I would be able to live like that. I could definitely do it if I lived in town, but I don’t. At least I can blame all my problems on my father for living in this shithole in the middle of nowhere.

Fuck.

My mom left today, she was in hysterics. Well actually, she leaves at 4 a.m. tonight. But since I didn’t have a car, I had to get a ride home with her friend. But at least I am prepared for tomorrow. I’m going to ride my bike home from work tomorrow. I’ve got my backpack and my water bottle holder and my cell phone, so I’m set. I guess.

I saw Joe when I went to Wal-Mart. It’s so depressing to say goodbye to someone for ever and ever. You lie to yourself that you will send e-mails, but you just get so involved in the drama and bullshit of your life that all you can do is complain about yourself on your blog… Or at least that’s what I do. I can’t talk to the people that I love over the Internet because it gets me very depressed. I know that’s a very selfish way to act, but I just can’t handle it. I’m balancing school and work and all of these horrible things keep happening to keep me in this town that I hate so much and around people that I don’t like. I can’t take on the responsibility of being lonely too.

This is my epic battle against Crescent City. I will win or I will die. One or the other. And I know which one it’s going to be. I am going to fucking win. I’m going to beat Paranoia on trick. I am going to get a master’s degree. I am an atom and nothing can break me down. Fuck everyone and everything that gets in my way.

On the good news side of things, I did finish Survivor. I hesitate to say it, but I’m growing tired of Chuck P.’s repetitive writing style. The book was great, but he just can’t break out of that flow. It’s fun for the first hundred pages, but I was just annoyed towards the end. He was just repeating random shit, like graffiti on bathroom stalls. What the fuck was the point?

I feel like a failure because I don’t have my car. I might not be able to take my kitty to Brookings to get his stitches taken out. I might not be able to see Amanda this weekend. Eh, fuck it. I’ll ride my bike out there if I have to…but it’s the ride back that creeps me out. It would be all too stereotypical to get run down by a drunk driver at 2 a.m.

I guess all of this is just fallout from the fact that I actually am deeply sad to see my mom go. Since we had that talk on the way to Bandon, I feel like I can really relate to her.

I’m all she has in this horrible world.

I’m so tawny. I had this raging erection at work today, it would have been so embarrassing had I had to get up. My mind was racing with all the hot guys I’d fucked and the ones I had yet to fuck. It really doesn’t help that I have a huge crush on one of my coworkers and with my brain being filled up with half-remembered scenes from pornos, I half-believe he’ll see my hard-on and just blow me right there in the office. I hate how I’m just a slave to my endocrine system. I hate how with enough sleepdep, porn and reality fuse into one hazy, ersatz peep show. I really want to become a eunuch, but my voice would get all high-pitched…and I heard it’s bad for your health.

But I can’t really think of another thing to take the place of sex in my trinity of passions: technology, sex, and literature.

Nothing really fits into that hole. Gardening? Maybe extreme sports, but then again I am very lazy and get into hysterics when I have injuries. One time I passed out at the sight of my own blood.

I really could feel the message of Survivor. We all have the same collective memory due to the television shows we all watched growing up, so everything we do is preprogrammed. There is no free will. Nothing is exciting anymore. It’s just another plot. More jamais vu. The only mystery left is death.

I haven’t reached that point, but I feel like it’s coming. Thirties perhaps. Maybe forties. That seems to be the age of all of Chuck’s characters.

My face is coated in a permanent layer of oil. I could fry chicken on my face. Billions of bacteria are using my face to fuck. That’s sort of hot, in a very…protozoan way. I think I’ll watch some porn. It will bring me out of this shitty mood and perhaps free me from a repeat of today’s embarrassment.

And also, for the record… I do not want to be kept alive by artificial means. Keep me on the machine for one or two months or so if I might wake up, then just disconnect me. I don’t really know who would be paying my hospital bills though, so they would probably just unplug me from the start once they realized I didn’t have health insurance.

Oh yeah, I remember one more thing from last night’s get-together:

“Once you’ve seen one penis demon, you’ve seen them all.”

On the way home I started listening to the latest Garbage album Bleed Like Me and it brought back all sorts of memories about Ripley. I just keep wondering… did we actually have something? Was he using me? Does he still like me? If he moved out of his abusive boyfriend’s house, would we go out again? Does he still read my blog? The latter is probably the deciding factor in all the other questions.

I’m just sick of not being happy.

The visit to Misty’s house was not spectacular at all. The first 20 minutes of it she was watching a DVD of this retarded WB show about a doctor in some random Colorado town. The script was about as interesting as the shit I took a few hours ago. Slightly chunky and in two logs, one slightly smaller than the other, the show played on and on and on. The dialogue so contrived, unoriginal and puerile only Misty could find entertaining. So I vigorously made fun of it until the episode was over and I implored her to watch something else. I popped in Big Fish and she fell asleep halfway through it. We had almost nothing to talk about. I was utterly bored. I’m glad I’m home. But at least I have something to blog about.

I’m going to go read/go to sleep. Of course, there is a ubiquitous step that I have omitted. But in the spirit of last night’s two-hour conversation about dildos, I’m going to go jerk off! Woohoo!

My new job was really fun and cool, I really bonded with Laurie, the lady there that is training me. She is totally cool. Imagine her as Roseanne, minus 50 lbs. and with red hair. We Bush-bashed. It was nice. And I demonstrated my utmost competence. Towards the end of the night when she got tired I was basically running the whole show.

Me and my mom went to the beach today, and I washed my car. It got totally caked with bird shit. And of course, since it got washed, it will get caked again tomorrow. I have such a headache. When I got home it looked like my dad had jotted down the name of someone at my work. How many fucking brain cells does it take for him to give them my cell phone number? How many? Stupid old man. Die and get it over with or give them my number. Bloody hell.

I talked with Selena today after I got off work, I really miss hanging out with her. I will call her after I get off work tomorrow to see if she wants to go to the fair. My mother sent me an e-mail saying she found someone to go on all the rides with me. She means well, but she doesn’t understand. I meant one of my friends. But I don’t have any friends. Not anymore. All I have is acquaintances. I haven’t talked to Joe since last week. For all I know, he could be in Portland. He’ll probably be a successful something or other, but still a Republican.

The more I think about it, the more I don’t feel like the Democrat/Republican battle matters. Now that I have money, I should get that Simone de Beauvoir novel All Men Are Mortal. From what I read about it, she metaphorically argues the point that people make the same mistakes over and over again. All the letters to the editor I read in the Triplicate, the crazed rantings of old men screaming at the tops of their lungs to make us forget the truth and pledge unconditional allegiance President Bush, they scare me. I’m sure at some small newspaper in 1940s Germany, the same letters were published. I fear we’re about to have World War III. And this time, there’s no one that can stand up to us. Hitler tried to take over the world to enslave it, we’re going to take it over to “set it free.”

Operation Iraqi Freedom, right?

Next on the list is Operation World Peace.

But don’t listen to me. I’m just a disposable American.

I wish Ripley would come online. I’m lonely. I don’t want to go to the fair tomorrow. I don’t want to go alone. And they don’t want to go with whoever my mother has found for me. That’s worse than going alone: going with someone your mother found for you.

I must stop listening to The Cure. It’s just making me weepy and emotional. But OMG I thought of the coolest memory when I was watching Daria tonight!

It was from back when I was going out with Taggart. He would come back from his job at the pizza place and I would crawl into his arms on the dilapidated sofa and breathe in the pizza aroma mixed with the Camels he smoked, mixed with his cologne. It was incredibly sexy. And I would just hold him as we watched movies thinking “I’m home. This is all I need. This is all I ever wanted.”

It was a nice time. But nothing good ever lasts. Well, I guess I should face it: the sex wasn’t so great. But at least I was emotionally fulfilled. And you can never really feel right having sex with bisexuals. In the back of my mind I always thought that he was imagining having sex with a chick. But he enjoyed doing a lot of things that are impossible in straight sex. That’s probably why he used me. The fact is, even if I was a hermaphrodite, he would still dump me and move on because he can’t be satisfied with one person.

Anyway, I shouldn’t be bringing all this old crap up. If you want to read the happiest posts ever in the whole history of my blog, look at the posts from late December or early January of 2003/2004.

I really need to find a way to hide all of my old posts, because the only time that I will find out if that insane freak Amanda B. is scouring my entries looking for dirt is if my boss asks me into his office. When I post this I will look into it.

I really need to go through every single post I’ve ever written and attempt to edit the offending ones. I’m sure there would only be two or three that would get me into trouble. But I have over 2000 posts. And let’s face it: that would take FOREVER.

I brought up my blog on the production computer (1.8GHz G5, whoo!) at my second job, and the text looked all weird and I could barely read it. Let it be known for all time: I don’t like serif fonts. They look funky unless you have a really good monitor. But I guess I can dislike it all I want, since I have no idea how to change it. Well, actually do have a pretty good idea but my wrists are killing me this week and I don’t feel like experimenting.

Do any of you guys have a problem reading stuff? I think I could bump up the text size a bit without too much trouble.

Anyway, I should probably wrap up this diatribe about my endless struggle against nothing. It’s 1:26 a.m. What’s that quote?

It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Google says it’s from Macbeth. I always thought it was some other writer. Hmm.

400 or so years later and we can’t say it any better. I need some sleep. A lot of sleep.

I hung out with my mom almost all day today. We didn’t really have much to talk about, but I took her down to Endert’s Beach and it was a really nice setting to hang out and walk along the beach, talking about the occasional thing that crossed our minds.

Later we went up to Brookings so she could do some karaoke with her old buddies. I was really bored and just stayed in the car and listened to music most of the time. She had fun though, and that’s what mattered. I drove over to Fred Meyer, but I had forgotten my check card at home. I couldn’t help myself but drive by Ripley’s house. I don’t know what I was expecting… perhaps his abusive boyfriend leering out the window with a carving knife… but there was nothing. All the time I was up there I was half waiting for my friends to call me wanting to do something. It’s 1 AM. Nothing.

It’s not like I’m complaining, because I didn’t call anyone… but I just feel like Misty and Selena have cooler people to hang out with than me. And of course I feel like Ben doesn’t really want to hang out with me either. It’s all just me overanalyzing everything, as usual. I want to hang out with Ben, but I can’t really imagine what we would do except for drive around Crescent City aimlessly. I’m not 21 so I can buy alcohol. I just don’t know how to relate to him. I don’t know how to relate to anyone. I’m hopeless. The only thing I can relate to is my voice recognition software and my computer. I can relate to the Internet. I can relate to books. I just feel so hopelessly alone. I feel like in the future I’m going to be the Insipid Coworker of Doom. Everyone’s going to secretly make fun of me behind my back because that’s what they did in grade school.

And now I can’t stop thinking about Ripley, how much I miss him… even though we only hung out for like a week before he dumped me. This is all so puerile. But of course now that he told me of that his boyfriend and him have been getting into physical fights, many times through the day I’m thinking to myself “What if Ripley’s getting the shit beat out of him right now?” A lot of the times I feel like what I really feel for Ripley isn’t so much that I love him, but that everyone in the world has fucked him over. And I want to be the one person that didn’t just use him. But I would be using him. I would keep telling him to go back to school and stuff and trying to make him into a person that he isn’t. But he isn’t happy with that creepazoid that he’s living with so maybe he does want to turn over a new leaf. I don’t know. I guess it’s impossible to go out with someone without changing them. I hate being used but then again I will use people without a second thought. I hate people that try to change you but I try to change everyone I know. Why am I such a hypocrite?

I lent my mom The Haunting of Hill House. I doubt she’ll read it, but it’s the thought that counts. She expressed interest in it over the phone, and I wanted to show that I paid attention. I did nothing today except for hang out with her. At least I made a new playlist on iTunes. It’s pretty cool.

Some Peaches, Meat Beat Manifesto, Human League, Smiths, Jamiroquai. It’s very nice. I’m bored. And anxious. I hate how I just…get so into people I go out with. Even if I only go out with them for a weekend. I suppose I just want to be happy again, and the possibility makes me a bit giddy.

I’m going to take a shower and try to relax.