YAY!

Since I am generally an excited sort of person, I am going to blog about all of the things that are currently exciting me. Because there are several:

1) I am excited about this summer, and the fact that I have a job that is hard, but so far tolerable and even quite satisfying in an "I just busted my ass for 8 hours, and my feet and back hurt, and I've run up and down the stairs about six hundred times because I kept forgetting things on different floors, and I feel like I've been stewing in urine and mop water and I probably smell like it too, but damn those bathrooms are CLEAN" sort of way, not to mention the fact that said job pays enough for me to be able to spend my entire first paycheque on clothes, pay rent, AND save for England, AT THE SAME TIME.

2) The part about the clothes. Seriously, I am going to throw out everything I own and just completely restock. Good god, it has been SO LONG. Mmmm tank tops and hooded sweatshirts. Sandals. FLAAATS! SUNDRESSES!!!!!

3) Living in my NEW Sweet Digs, with my NEW Sweet Roommate! We will watch lots of Arrested Development, have nerdy conversations about Lord of the Rings over Cheerios (except I don't really like Cheerios, but I'm going for aesthetic here. Just roll with it.) and go out cruising in his car and pick up babes. The babes will be for him. Mostly.

4) Summer. There is sun in the summertime. Sun means several things, including, but certainly not limited to: shorts, skirts, flip flops, not ski jackets, freckles, tans (not likely, but I can dream), frolicking about outside, lying on the beach, eating ice cream (something I do year round, but not always while slightly sunburned and wearing only the bottom half of a bikini that is being pulled down by a dog), being warm outside at night, FUN, not drowning while attempting to walk places, and skin cancer. That last one is not so good, but nothing is perfect. Give the sun a break. You are giving the sun an inferiority complex. Are YOU perfect? I didn't think so. You probably have skin cancer or something. I'd call that a defect.

5) Improv in the summer! This will be awesome. I feel as though that is enough said.

6) Sketch comedy in the summer! This could potentially be included in the Sweet Digs/Roommate section, but there may be other people involved, and besides, proper categorization is so overrated.

7) Fun. I anticipate a large amount of fun in the near future. I like fun.

8) Regina Spektor tomorrow night!! Something I've sort of forgotten about until now what with all the other haps, but OH MAN. I'm so gay for her. She rocks.

9) Harry Potter SEVEN. Even though after it comes out I will have nothing left to live for. But we will address that problem when it arises. She better let Harry live. She just better had. Unless he dies a REALLY good death. Like... I don't even know. It would have to be so good my mind wouldn't even be able to comprehend it, and then I wouldn't like that either, because I would feel stupid for not getting it and I wouldn't really know what had happened. So he just better live, I think. And she better keep Ginny around, too. This whole All-The-People-Harry-Truly-Loves-Dying-Untimely-Deaths thing is getting a bit old.

10) ENGLAND. Oh wow. Except the excitement for that is sort of dulled, since it will happen after the summer is over, and right now I want summer to start and continue FOREVER, but trust me, soon I will be completely incontinent with glee.

11) HEROES. And the babies I am going to have with Mohinder.

12) School being DONE, for a WHOLE YEAR. Procrastinating and slacking off, one may not realize, is extremely stressful. Especially when one has such high expectations of oneself as I do, and one does not enjoy feeling like a useless schlub of butter (maybe mouldy butter, since regular butter is still good for things like putting on bread and baking and taking off rings that have got too tight). Ironically, I am excited to be out of school so I can READ. I plan on devouring the library. But not literally. Well, maybe a little.

13) Breaking in my new fancy racing-type swimsuit. I will learn to do the front crawl in a straight line before the summer is out, damnit! As I said, high expectations.

14) Going home for a week. Though the hideously early morning commute to work will be a pain, I have had a hankering for some good old fashioned hometown life at the 'rents. And I think a week will be just enough to fulfill my craving and also make me slightly sick of it, and thus ready to break in the SWEET DIGS.

15) Capital letters, apparently.

The end. I think I'll go dance around and hum tunelessly and generally be sickeningly good-natured. Avoid me at all costs. HooRAH!

Fish!

I'm becoming increasingly irritated by this whole idea of taking pride in one's taste in music, as though instinctively responding to certain sounds and lyrics and combinations thereof instead of others is some sort of elite skill. As though those who listen to "good music" are of superior intellect and talent. But I don't quite see how one can take pride something created by someone else entirely.

I could make this into a long, rambling and deeply boring rant, but I think I won't. I will save essentially repeating myself for 9 pages for my research paper. I'll need all the strength I've got.

In other news, I started my first official day of real work today. It was a lot of toilet scrubbing magic. In actuality, though, it wasn't too bad; the work was pretty easy, and it seemed to go by fairly quickly. My bones and joints are sufficiently achy and creaky though, which only furthers my growing suspicion that I am actually a 73-year-old arthritic woman in disguise. And now, for whatever reason, I am capping off the day by doing more cleaning at home before I go to bed. But I am drinking orange juice and listening to Ray LaMontagne (and may I say, I am extremely proud of myself for his skill at incorporating spanish guitar into modern ballads and sounding so darn pretty while doing so) as I clean, which I wasn't allowed to do at work, so I guess that's cool. Anyway, my back hurts, so I think I'll go prepare a hot pack at watch Matlock.

GoodNIGHT.

Art

So I was browsing some pictures of celebrities wearing pretty clothes earlier, as one is wont to do (solely to look at the clothes, I swear), when I happened to notice a banner advertising some reality show at the top of my screen that flashed a picture of a man and a woman in sequence, and said something to the effect of "Mom AND diva; the perfect woman!" and "Heartthrob! Suuuuuuper famous recording artist! Seriously, you've heard of him! We promise!" and then there was a picture of both of them, and it said something like "Hopelessy, ridiculously, FAMOUSLY in love!" So after I had cleaned the vomit out of my keyboard, I realized I sort of recognized them, and then of course I became reeeaally reeeeeally curious -- curious in a way I can never seem to become about Augustinian doctrine or Foucault's theory of author function -- so I Googled. It turns out it was some British pap whore (paparazzi whore -- it's a phrase I invented. I think the revolting conotation suits it.) couple called Katie Price and Peter Andre, of whom I had vaguely heard. All told, it wasn't a very exciting Google. But then I hit Image Search, and everything changed...

http://ops.tamu.edu/kilroy/BF2S/Katie-Price(Jordan.jpg

The wink! The hat! The kissy face! The thumbs-up COVERING HER NIPPLES! It's... it's beautiful. It's art. The way her one fist sort of squishes into her boob like it's some sort of grotesque giant silicone pillow... I can't stop staring at it. I always knew the British were classy, but... Linsday Lohan has NOTHING on this shit! Paris Hilton is MILES behind! Why is there none of this going on on the North American C-list?? I demand more hand-bras and lazy eyes! THIS, my friends, is sex appeal.

Good Advice That You Should Follow

tasia- and she fell right on down. says:
actually, i'm at my "ideal" size. according to my diary a few years ago, i wanted to be a 34C. AND NOW I AM.
Shauna Suresh says:
that's NUTS
tasia- and she fell right on down. says:
i'm considering dying satisfied right now.
Shauna Suresh says:
hahaha
Shauna Suresh says:
i don't think that would be a good idea
Shauna Suresh says:
recent femenist theory suggest that achieving a 34C cup size will not be your greatest accomplishment in life.

Aha! Relief!

Lucy walked around the living room ninety five times that night, counting each step in the first round, and then each one after that, until she reached 9,352, which she divided by 98 (the number of steps in one round) to get 95. She wrote all this down on a page in the back of her history notebook, and then scribbled it out violently and drew several vague sketches in blue pen on the next page. Then she walked around the living room a full thirty five times, using the same math but taking smaller steps so as to achieve a different average steps per round. Again, she wrote it all down, and again she scratched it all out, this time moving on to the next page with some lines of scattered verse that fell out of her head onto the page desperately, glad for a blank expanse, without other thoughts competing for space in a brain cluttered with snippets. Lucy put down her pen, which grudged her the misuse, and walked around the living room again, bigger steps this time, but declined to write down her calculations, sure now, from past experience, what she would do once she had. She tried to move directly to the next page, even scribbled out the nothing on the one that came before, but found that there was nothing in her head and no muscles in her hand to move the pen, which was relieved. Tired of walking around the living room, and dizzy come to that, Lucy sat in a chair and stared at nothing for a while, until she realized that she was staring at something, and that it was a houseplant that was dying of neglect, so she closed her eyes and turned her head to be doubly sure there was nothing to stare at. Soon, however, it became apparent that she was staring at something, and even though that something was nothing more than the backs of her eyelids, it was distracting, and prevented her from thinking.

Lucy lay face down on her bed and breathed deeply, trying to catch a whiff of the night before, but there was nothing but a blank scent that must have been her own and not enough air. She lay that way for a while, inversely smothered, trying to imitate tragedy, but with one nostril cheating ever so slightly to the side.

Lucy summoned snippets, wishing she had a fuller picture, and burrowed deeper under the covers. She fell asleep and didn't dream because she didn’t need to, and when she woke up the lights in the living room glared on her footsteps, and the pen had fallen to the floor and was attempting to hide under the pile of clothes she didn't want to move just yet because, among the snippets in her head, she remembered how they had got there.

Lucy stood and walked without direction, finding herself in the kitchen and staring at the toaster confused. Another snippet floated to the top of her memory, and she opened the fridge to look for it. She found it lurking among the water bottles, and going back to her room found that, indeed, there was an empty one lying on the bedside table.

Lucy lay down, on her back this time, and assembled all the snippets she had in a line in her head, and began the task of organizing them. Chronological order wasn’t very hard; it seemed that after time stopped being a given, but rather something that popped in and out of existence unexpectedly and at whim, the snippets arranged themselves, and the stragglers that surfaced late arrived in order, from first to last. It was significance she had trouble with. Each snippet was incomplete; she remembered the physical act, the names of things, but she couldn’t remember how she had felt – if she had even felt anything– about each thing as it happened. She managed to scrounge up, in relative order: unease, reckless abandon, surprise, excitement, contentment (this one was troublesome; the word needed to be stronger, almost violent, but she couldn’t think of any word that had this paradox as a definition), restlessness, worry, disappointment. These were the things that she could vaguely remember feeling, and she trusted them at least a little bit more than the things she would come up with next, which were brand new and retroactively applied to the assembled snippets. This part was like crying in a movie; any emotion she could come up with now was diluted, insincere, reflective of the fact that these things were happening through a blurry lens, to a different Lucy, under a different director.

Lucy might have lied. She wasn’t sure. She was stirring the snippets now, in a cup in her head, and it was hard to keep other things, irrelevant things from getting mixed in. Lucy didn’t have a problem with lying, per se; or rather, she felt perhaps that she should, but couldn’t seem to summon the necessary gut reaction for such morality, and so had given up on it. The problem was that, by default, she didn’t know if she had told the truth, and this made the snippets very hard to categorize and control.

It was the violent contentment that confused her. Lucy stood and looked at the bed. I want to always be lying here looking at you. It was the violent contentment that was the kicker. She knew what it meant; she had invented the term. But it was the violent contentment that confused her. Something more, there’s something more, there’s something not here that makes this contentment a violent contentment. She looked at the bed, squinting, staring at the sheets and the covers and the violent contentment that she could see but not touch. There was a contentment that was a violent contentment, and that was the kicker.

* * *

Lucy wrote love songs. Each one was sordid but discreet, very unhappy, and ending in pith. Lucy churned out love songs like a factory, her assembly line of nerves, brain, and fingers working haphazardly and predictably.

* * *

Lucy was surrounded by pictures of herself, staring down from the walls. There were too many of them, and they were laughing, looking out from behind different masks, they were grinning, they stared at her while she moved like a doll, arms stiff and eyes dull, while she took things out and placed them on the desk; heart, lungs, liver, stomach.

Lucy sat on the edge of the bed, empty nightstand, bare floor. The pictures stared at her while she stared at the air, which grew sparser, floating away, abandoning her in bored disgust. Bits of Lucy were numb. Lucy looked at her feet and ran to the bathroom to throw up. She returned, sat on the bed, lifted her hands to see fingernails, joints, soft skin, and ran to the bathroom to throw up. Washing her face in the sink, she looked up and the mirror threw the sharp, stark shapes of eyes, mouth, nose, skin back at her. She did not have time to run, and puked right there in the sink. Eyes, nose, mouth, skin, details, blank, cold, cheap, blank, cold, cheap; she emptied her stomach into the sink, looked into the mirror for the rest, rung the soft pink folds dry in the white ceramic. She returned, eyes firmly closed, feeling along the wall, which pushed her along with a recoiling haste, cold paint allowing only a brush of fingertips for the barest essential sense of direction. The bedroom moved away from the blind woman, who grazed no shins or toes or elbows as she felt for the reluctant bed. Sitting on the edge, she did not sleep and she did not cry.

* * *

Lucy sat down with her pen and her paper and her anger and realized to her delight that she had absolutely nothing to write down about your colourless, hazy face.


The End

Very Rough Draft of the Beginnings of a Poem/Song of Which I Actually Really Only Like the First Verse

You were lying on your back in bed
With tears rolling into your ears
I was lying beside you inside of your head
As I had been doing all year
There were demons in your closet
Pulling fabric from your skirts
Putting bombs inside your pockets
While you deafened yourself, inert

You were grasping in vain at straws, my love
Shreds of intellectual dignity
In bed you gazed at those above
Composed your silly silent symphony
You were trying harder than you were before
Or trying to think about trying to try
But a one-woman show is so easy to score
And it felt so poetic to lie there and cry




Your thoughts?