Sylar and Peter from Heroes!

"Revolutions, violent and otherwise, are made by people who have learned to count very slowly to ten."
 -Barbara Ehrenreich

"I just really need to get a big magnet."

Man with wooden leg escapes prison. He's caught. They take his wooden leg away from him. Every day he must cross a large hill and swim a wide river to get to the field where he must work all day with one leg. This goes on for a year. At the Christmas Party they give him back his leg. Now he doesn't want it. His escape is all planned. It requires only one leg.
- James Tate

Peter left for LA this weekend. Next week, Summer is leaving for Mexico, Paige is going to South Africa, Sheila will be going back to Berlin in a few weeks, and I'll be... here. And that is so cool. I love to travel and everything, but the stresslessness of not having to get ready to -go somewhere-... I'm enjoying travelling vicariously through my lovely friends and being happy for them.
Having Peter in LA is ugh. That self-absorbed bastard actor-lover of his, treating him like he's barely good enough to be sleeping with him. I thought he'd be too busy and having too much fun to call me every day, but he does and I can hear the strain in his voice under the cheerful. I asked him what LA was like and he said hot and lonely. So nice to trade volleys of "I love you, I love you, I love you!" before saying goodnight.
Marlon (Peter's ex) just offered me Endfest as an early birthday present. Smashing Pumpkins is headlining and Bright Eyes is playing, too. He needs to stop being so sweet and seemingly harmless. I know what harm can come from this. Bright Eyes, though! Okay, I'll shut up now.

Possibly the best thing in the whole world to me right now is that there are so many beautiful, deep, sparkling, emotionally wrenching people in it, and this is the feeling I get whenever I read my Friend's list. 

Okay, Americorps, here I come, you've convinced me. *bashes head against the wall* Bash, bash, bash.

Because I would just get bored living in a cute little apartment and accumulating stuff. I think I wanna be in Seattle or Portland so bad- yeah, that'd last about four months. The platform bed and the bunny rabbit and the cute mod dishes and the fabulous clothes, it would please me for awhile, but the easy life...not for me. Ten months of moving around constantly, doing disaster relief and fighting fires and having no self-determination, which is the scariest thing of all for me, is ultimately, a better fit.

I surrender.

My roommate just left to go home to New York. We had lots of interesting, funny conversations in the four weeks and a half weeks we lived together, and I liked her a great deal. Today was, I guess, the end of a-term and the halfway mark of my summer, but it feels like it should be over by now. When she left I curled my toes as I watched her go. Then I got out of bed where I've been all day reading a book for school, drowsy and occasionally sleeping in the hot sunlight. Interesting thing, Abu-Najmeh said: you have to leave a thing three times before you truly get away from it.

So I had a pretty liquifying weekend. I'm so relaxed I'm worried about my spine sliding out of my body. So not into school tomorrow. I hope this week goes fast. Am fully in summer-mode now. Read all of Sexy Losers (www.sexylosers.com), a pornographic, dark, anime webcomic. I'd really recommend it, my favorite plot line revolves around a cute necrophiliac. Laughed my butt off watching Boondocks and Samurai Champloo and talking to my friends. I don't usually do this stuff. Yeah...*looks sad* I don't have a lotta....fun. Or when I do it's highly structured, well-planned fun! Yeah, I'm a nerd. I'm the one that goes to a party and is like "Instead of smoking weed and drinking, let's have a scavenger hunt!"
My grandma got pictures of me from Alaska back from Walgreens- yeah, the average film roll turnaround in my house is a year. She said there's a really cute one of me kneeling by my backpack and looking up at the photographer and smiling. And one of me with the little orphan boy in Yager's. I am suprisingly wonderful with kids. I think it's because I respect them. I'm someone when I'm with kids that I want to be with everyone else but can't quite manage- beaming, sweet, patient, affectionate, outgoing. Might be probably heading home next weekend. To see my cuz, ostensibly. Damn, I love that word. Ever see a pride and an ego fight? Pride's like "No! I don't want to do this!" Ego's like "I need it! I need to feeeeed!!!!" I am sick of my family and everyone else's.

I really wish girls wouldn't use Myspace to try to get guys to fuck them. Hello? You don't need the Myspace. All you need, cute girls, is to be in relative proximity to the guys. It makes me so sad, these pretty, interesting girls with their funky clothes and good taste in music throwing themselves on "cool" guys with their flirtatious comments. Let me tell you what will happen, ladies, so you don't need to experiment like this. If you throw it on the ground, the men will pick it up. No worries there.

It's one thirty on a school night, but damnit, I've got Cap'n Jack! Not Jack Sparrow, but they're in a neck and neck race for hotness. No, I've got Captain Jack Harkness of Dr. Who, the british sci-fi phenom. Kissing the lovely Doctor before heroically sacraficing himself. This makes me so happy and satisfied and filled with warm chocolate chip cookies in my heart.

I have an insurmountable pile of Greek to do. Luckily, it's Saturday. John and Andrea are coming up to visit me tomorrow, I'm looking forward to showing them the campus. I bought a bunch of things- Lancome sunscreen, a pretty green headband, expensive body cream that smells like a woodland park bordering the ocean. Life is pretty good- life would be great if I wasn't constantly overwhelmed by how hard Greek is. Without Greek, life would be positively idyllic. I like it, I just don't have time to do any of the fun things I could do this summer, and it's always making me hyper-stressed out. That's all I guess- not a lot of room for anything else in my life right now. Maybe trying to find an apartment in September.

The more I read and expose myself to other people's opinions, and to historical contexts on which it is possibly to have an opinion, the more I reveal myself as a feminist and an intellectual, a non-hippy and somewhat of a bitch, and a thoroughly secular and rational person where politics is concerned. Despite myself and not liking those groups and not liking to be labeled besides. "Oh, I'm not a feminist." But all it takes is a quick note of how many books are written about "My Father" by their son, or Famous men's fathers, or the slew of supposedly profound and historically important books about "A father and his son." I know that none of my brothers, and quite possibly no young man period, has a deeper, more profound, more nuanced, more intellectual, more life-changing relationship with -his- father than I do with mine. And there is not a son in the picture that my father has a greater desire for the approval, love and acceptance of his ideas and philosophies by. And I'm sure this goes for a great many women. But most of the writing you get on a "girls" relationship with her "daddy" is all about how she wants him to think she's pretty and shit, and not walk out on her and her mom.

There is as much pathos, as much competition, and as much emotional baggage between a father and his daughter as between a father and his son. If I see one more old white novelist has written a wildly sucessful book about "my father at 85 and how he's shaped my manly, manly life" I'm going to puke on it.

"He is not a grazing goat and has food flown in from Wales. Billy also has an allowance of two cigarettes a day -- both of which he eats," said the spokeswoman.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/06/24/goat.demoted.ap/index.html

So Greek is clipping along nicely despite my major procrastinations, I do really well with reading along with the passages while someone else reads them aloud. And it's fun- I go to bed and I'd rather be getting up to go to Greek. Fiction of Diaspora is another story, because the teacher is -kiiiiind- of a dick. Don't get me wrong, he's a nice enough guy, but he apparently decided the first day that he didn't like my personality. I'm not shy and retiring enough for him. As in most classes, there are 3 people who interact with each other and the teacher, and 20 who are just in it to satisfy their English requirement and have no idea what's going on or don't care. I'm one of the three, but unlike the other two, I'm not hippy-dippy. So he'd rather sit there in silence hoping one of the 20 will ask a question than answer one of mine. Apparently, I get -one- question or comment per class peiod, or I'm hogging the teacher. So we do a lot of sitting in silence while the other kids doodle little superheros in their notebooks and -I'm- not aloud to talk.

I've finally found a piece of technology (other than my dear 3rd gen iPod) to go gagga about. Now, those of you that know me know that I don't carry a cell phone. I just don't want to talk to people enough for it to be worthwhile. I had one for a little while and it became like a codependant relationship- 'where's the phone? does it need to be charged? can I take it in here? do I have messages?' Less so for me than for some others. People run around with their bright little phones glued to their hands at college, lest anyone (god forbid) not be able to get ahold of them.
But I've finally found a phone that I think is the shit. No, it's not a Razor. It's a... GPS locator, MP3 player, weatherproof rubber coated phone! With a color screen so you can call up a satelitte map of wherever you are in the world. Now, if it would only do ten-language simple translations, I'd be in love.

All I wanted was a peaceful couple of weeks in Anacortes. You know, to decompress, meditate, do a little reading, enjoy the tremendous natural beauty. Yeah, it apparently wasn't in the cards.
I can't decide if I want to spend this summer really alone, because I enjoy my own company, and just do the things I like to do, or if I want to hook up with men, women and animals. Ideal would be one man and one woman. I think that's gonna be my quota while I'm at the U of Wa. I want to have some fun. I'm tired of people doing the same old shit they've been doing forever. This summer I want to focus on two things: Arabic, and taking really, really good care of myself. Physically, mentally, emotionally, creatively, spiritually, intellectually. There are so many ways to be well or not well.
I think I also have to bop up to Alaska at some point before the quarter starts. It's good for the soul, like I told Andrea, digging for razor clams on the beach, hiking in the forests next to cool, clean streams, fishing for Halibut in the ocean. I think going there last summer put a need in me for it, like now I'm going to have to get my "Alaska fix".

that Dr. Anderson was right. The line that divides hate and love is thinner than I ever believed possible.

No tell what side I'm staying on.

Princes on the steeple and all the pretty people
They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made
You used to be so amused.
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.


- Lyrics, Bob Dylan