I've really come to believe over the past few years that as cliche as it sounds, everything does seem to happen for a reason, at least in my life. Mainly the people I meet, it's like people enter my life and serve a purpose and then they are gone from it, amicably or not. I'm probably about 50/50 there. But there's one thing I'm doing right now and I just can't figure out why. Nothing good has come from it, and it causes infinite amounts of stress and anger and disappointment. I'm hoping that over the next few years its meaning will reveal itself, but until then it looks like I'm just out about $2000 with nothing to show for it.

I've been getting a lot better at being deceptively dishonest lately, and also much more assertive. These things are both good and bad.

An old friend of mine posted this in his blog. I think he's student teaching:

Matt + Third Graders
Matt: Alright, I see that someone added "compassion" to our list [of qualities of citizenship], who wrote that?
Erica: Me!
Matt: Good job, Erica, that's one of the most important ones! Can anybody tell me why it is important to have compassion?
John: I can.
Matt: Alright, John?
John: It's important to have compassion because you need it to save the world, and our world needs saving because George Bush keeps starting wars.
Matt: ...
Hanna: Yeah, you should vote for Obama, he's campaigning for change.
Matt: ... ...



I mean really.

Someone has been in the shower since before I got home 15 minutes ago. That shower is so tiny that I can't handle being in it for more than 5 minutes, and I am not at all claustrophobic. I don't know what you could possibly DO in there for more than 10 minutes, tops.

The reason I complain is that I have been at Delta all night doing informal recruitment stuff, and I am helping out with childcare at a moms' group tomorrow morning. I had planned on showering now and letting my hair dry over night, but now I have to get up an hour earlier than planned to shower and dry my hair before I leave. Le sigh.

Recruitment went really well, though, and I'm excited to see what happens tomorrow night at bid pickup. OK whoever is in the shower is blowing her nose in there. Gross. I shouldn't be able to hear that through two closed doors.

I hope I can fall asleep tonight. I finally bought some Tylenol PM because the past week or so I've had a really hard time falling asleep, and my back has also been hurting a lot when I lie down, so I figured it was a sensible thing to do. It didn't help me fall asleep last night, though, but I'm afraid to take more than the 2 it says to take, especially since I have to wake up in less than 8 hours and sleep aids always say you should have at least 8 hours to devote to sleep or whatever. I don't want to wake up super groggy or not wake up on time at all.

So yeah. I feel like I might start updating more. Though by saying that it may be a curse. I wonder if I should just start pasting all of these into livejournal since more people use that and I only have mine to read others. I have probably said this many times over the course of this journal's five-year life. But hey. I'll start now. Especially since now I know Erica is on lj. I mean. If I get to read about her life she should get to read about mine in a convenient way. If she wants to.

I have more to say about this, but I will stop here and get in bed. Maybe a more insightful update tomorrow. We'll see.

Clearly, the most recent entry with actual content is from my freshman year of college. But I mean. I decided I should start updating my deadjournal again, and with that I will just crosspost everything here. So what follows will just be that. For convenience, or whatever.

fyi

so_i_go

and

pixistik1687

need to be friends. now.

all i ever see on my friends page are the two of you talking about how much you love the beatles.

so please. be friends.

This is a motherfucking cry for help.

sometimes i have to wonder

OK so. I don't really want to explain all of Flunk Day. But I guess I will so I don't have to explain it in 50 different IMs and facebook comments like I have been getting.

Today at 5:45 am I woke up to the sound of a bunch of drunken students, known as the "friars," running up and down the street yelling "IT'S FLUNK DAY, WAKE UP, IT'S FLUNK DAY, IT'S FLUNK DAY!" I didn't believe them and rolled back over. See, it is a surprise when it is every year (during Spring Term) and there are usually scares and stuff. Well my roommate checked her email to find that it was indeed Flunk Day (they send it out at 6:00 am to confirm that yes, hooray, here it is).

For the day, all classes are cancelled, and it is one big party on campus. Most people were drunk off their asses by 6:30 am. I was not, because I usually work on Tuesdays, so I had to wait till a reasonable time to call them and see if it was OK if I didn't come in. We played in the giant foam / soap sud pit for a long time, and it was freezing out, but when the new foam was made and enveloped your body it was like being wrapped in a warm cloud. It was delicious. Then we went to the mud pit where Erika and Sarah rolled around and then hugged me a lot.

We came back to the suite around 10:00 I think and hung out resting till 12:00, then we went for lunch. It was a big picnic outside. Then the inflatable obstacle courses and things were up so we watched people do that, and there was karaoke. We kind of just wandered around all afternoon. We napped from about 2:45 - 4:00, then watched the student vs. faculty softball game, which was really fun. Dinner came next, then we hung out on the gizmo patio for awhile, and it started raining (BARELY) and they canceled the fire dancers that were scheduled for 7:00, and moved the 8:00 movie to 7:00 instead, but we didn't want to go.

We came back to the suite and started to play Egyptian Ratscrew, but then Post 4 and some guys were outside playing kickball and convinced us to join, so we did that until it got too dark to see the ball anymore. Now we're inside and Sarah is eating easy mac and doing math homework and I am up in my room tiiiiiiiiiiiiired. I have to write my French paper tomorrow even though it isn't due till Thursday now, but I have class and work until 6:00 which is when it is due, so I kind of have to do it tomorrow. Class is still cancelled tomorrow which rules. I think I'm going to bed really early cause I'm exhausted, then I'll get up early and write my paper as quickly as possible, then go practice piano for like 8 hours and work out. By 8 hours I really mean 1 or 2. And by write my paper as quickly as possible, I really mean spend all day on it. Though I do have some good ideas for it and I did some research that supports a good point. Hooray.

I don't know how I'm going to do this 4 minute speech though. When he assigned it, he said 3 minutes, and in his email today, he said 4 minutes. Also, we apparently have to have a visual aid that helps with comprehension, and that is worth 20 points. What kind of aid can we have besides the book itself? I don't know.

I do know that my neck is really sore, and that I will post pictures tomorrow when my camera batteries are charged back up and I can upload them to my computer in the first place.

kthxbye.

ummmmmmmmmmmm flunk day

At the bar there were fishermen, customs agents, day laborers. Over all their voices rang out the voice of one elderly man in the uniform of a prison guard, who was boasting drunkenly through the sea of chatter. "And every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells."

"Life and also death you might say," interjected another drunk, whose profession, as I learned at once, was a gravedigger. "With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get the smell of beer off you, like all the drinkers whose grave I have to dig."

I took this dialogue as a warning to be on guard: the world is falling apart and tries to lure me into its disintegration.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/13/earlyshow/main838253.shtml?CMP=OTC-RSSFeed&source=RSS&attr=Entertainment_838253


Hahahahahah.


That reminds me of an SNL skit, probably from 1996, where the three Hanson brothers were on the show either as hosts or musical guests, maybe both, and the three were put in an elevator where MMMBop played over and over. Time elapsed and first Isaac gave in and fell to the floor in terror. After awhile, Zac went too. But Taylor, Mr. Attention Hog, just stood there bopping along saying "I really like this song."

I still love the bou and all who work there. Especially these two pretty awesome people.

here is something both disturbing and extremely fascinating at the same time: http://www.planetdan.net/pics/misc/tetka.html

So these are just wrong and very creepy:

www.rentmyson.com

www.rentmydaughter.com

I totally hacked into my Knox email account. Hello, facebook.

Dear Michael,

I want to be with you, not writing to you. I'm sick of writing letters. I can't think of anything to say. But this is the closest thing to being with you that's available: this blank page, my thoughts, your music. I'm playing that Billy Bragg & Wilco CD you bought in Ohio. "California Stars." It's so wistful I could kill myself.
Why do I feel so defeated?
The first night in your apartment in New York. It was, what, a week after we met? I don't mean the Carnegie Deli, since we didn't actually meet then. Or in the elevator in the Brill Building later that day (what were the chances?), because still we didn't meet. I mean after I walked into Fanelli's a month later and there you were, this guy whose face I couldn't forget, standing behind the bar serving drinks. Who wouldn't think it was destiny? But it wasn't till I was in your apartment and I saw your paintings that I felt afraid it was true. They were melancholy but passionate, and somehow humorous, too; they expressed what I saw in your face that day. And then you put on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. This cool, serious guy was playing Herb Alpert. We drank tequila and danced around, laughing. I think I -- or you? -- started taking my clothes off before the second track.
And now it's six years later, and I'm not flying to you but away, reliving the past, longing for it, as I move further from it. The sun is rising over London; the frost crystals trapped in the window are tiny pink flowers. We'll be landing soon. On the phone you said, You sound like you have no choice. But you do, Olivia, and thinking you're not making one doesn't mean you aren't.
This isn't a choice, Michael, it's just a delay. Of a few more weeks.
Last night I was watching Bobby help Mad with her exercises. She was on the floor near the Christmas tree. Her beret had fallen off. Bobby sat at her feet. She slowly bent her right leg and Bobby bent the left and he held it gently so it wouldn't flop over. Her goal is to squeeze her thighs together. Her right leg was improving; in a week she'd gone from little movement to a few, slow inches. But her left leg was still as inert as a sock and every day that passes where it doesn't move means it's less likely she'll walk again. She concentrated, straining, biting her lip, jaw bearing down, her brown eyes willing that left thigh to move. I wondered what was going on inside her, how the intense concentration of what was left of her brain, a third of it, could translate --or not-- into the tiny flex of a left hamstring.
You did it, Bobby yelled. It moved! It moved! She exhaled and smiled her now-crooked half smile. He held her face in his hands and when he kissed her mouth I saw his tears drop on her cheeks. Oh, baby, you did it. He was as relieved as she was exhausted; she was going to walk again. He lay down next to her by the brightly lit tree and she rested her bald head on his shoulder. They laughed hard and he hugged her close to him.
I had to walk away. I was jealous, Michael. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I was.

Love,
Olivia

New Jack's Mannequin Tunes



Mhmm.