Somebody told me that you had a boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend that I had in February...
Today was a good day. Actually, today was a great day. It's been a long time since I've had a day that was so satisfying. For the first time since I can remember, the day was perfect: Nothing went wrong, I didn't have any problems, and even those tiny little minor annoyances like the cat yowling too loud or the house being too cold seemed virtually nonexistent. It was just a wonderful day. It didn't make me jubilantly happy. It made me...wholly satisfied. Not happy, not sad, not anywhere in between. Just totally satisfied. And that should be good enough for anyone.
11:30 AM: I finally gather enough energy to get my lazy ass out of bed. I love sleeping in on Saturday mornings. Really, there are few things greater in the world. After a solid week of having to be at school (much less out of bed) before the sun is even up, this morning was blissful. It's so great to roll over, look at the clock, see that it's 10:00 or whatever and be like, "Fuck it. I'm sleeping more," and then roll over and go back to sleep. This morning I got up at 11:30. Having gone to bed early the previous night (1:00 AM), this was a pretty good amount of sleep. I went into the day feeling rested.
12:30 PM: I'm at Twister's with my dad. I was really flippin' hungry since I hadn't eaten dinner the night before. I had a green chile cheeseburger. That was pretty yummy. For once, my dad didn't piss me off as I was eating with his dumbass conversations or whatever. But it wasn't silent either. There was some sort of communication there, even though I don't remember it. All I remember is that it was oddly tolerable.
1:45 PM: Having gotten back from eating lunch and going to the post office, my dad went up to his office to "work" (aka playing Solitaire and later bitching about his lack of productivity). This left me downstairs to do my own thang. On a whim, I sat on the couch and listened to The Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat album for its entire 76 minutes. It's not a very good album, no, but there's something about actually sitting on the couch and listening to music as I'm reading the lyrics out of the booklet. Something's just awesome about that.
3:01 PM: The CD is over, so I go upstairs and screw around on the computer for a little while. I don't remember what exactly I did, but it probably involved the keywords "hot," "sex," "broomstick," "AA battery," "boobs," "eyeball," and "narcolepsy." Or maybe I just checked my email, surfed around Myspace for a while, and read some other stuff around the 'net.
4:00 PM: The computer finally gets boring. I go to my room and decide to read the next section in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I was at Page One Too with my dad earlier this week and I saw a copy of it on the shelf for $6. Several people I know have mentioned it to me, so I figured I'd read it. My dad has basically a buttload of trade credit there, so I got the thing for free (along with a copy of Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine -- I am such a music whore).
6:15 PM: I finish the book. Yeah, this is officially the first time I've ever read a book (as in, 200+ page novel) in less than a week. Now I understand what people mean when they say they can't put a book down. I think it's a book that pretty much any thoughtful high schooler should read. It's funny, it's poignant, it's disturbing, it's very...um, detailed in certain places. But all of it seemed balanced just right. Being in high school, I know what it's like. And the guy who wrote it seemed to put everything in its place. I think what made the book great for me, though, was just the observations that the main character made and how I could relate to so much he was saying. (And isn't relating what makes pretty much anything great?)
Now if only Great Expectations was so exciting, then we'd be talking!
6:30 PM: I watched Ebert & Roeper. They were doing their worst movies of 2004. Ebert put The Village on his list! That made me happy like you can't believe. That movie sucked my balls. Roeper put Saw on his list, which I also agree with. Yuck. That movie was far too disturbing for its own good. Why is it every serial killer movie these days tries to be another Se7en? Oh well. Both Ebert and Roper put White Chicks on their lists. I remember watching, like, five minutes of that with Kim and Leah the first time we saw Napoleon Dynamite. It looked...uh, bad. Heh.
The REAL worst movie of the year was I, Robot. Neither of them even mentioned it. The bastards.
7:00 PM: About this time, Padre heads off to a party at Mr. Indie Filmmaker's apartment and leaves me home alone. Noticing it was a warm night and still in a somewhat thoughtful mood from finishing the book, I got my crap together and decided to take a walk. This walk was unique, though, because it's the first one I've taken since I got my CD player at Christmas. Naturally, I put The Cure's Disintegration in it and went on my way. I went up on that Juan Tabo dam and just stared out at the city for a while. I pressed play as soon as I got up there, and didn't stand up and walk off until the end of "Last Dance." So I sat there for the longest time, just staring...
Then I got up and walked through that neighborhood on the other side of Bear Canyon. I don't know why I did it. I just did. It just seemed like the thing to do. I had the CD player up so loud I couldn't hear anything else. It was blissful. I even ventured to walk past S.Y. Jackson and just look at it for a little while. I've said in the past that one of the creepiest things to me is an empty school at night. I have personal experiences to make that archetypal emotion even more potent, too. Ask me sometime if you haven't heard the stories. (There's one about Eisenhower, La Cueva, and Georgia O'Keefe. Take your pick.) I don't believe in ghosts, really, but there's something about schools at night that just makes me believe in them all of a sudden. Like, when everyone goes away and the sun goes down, the ghosts of students who once went there will walk the halls all night. I have a pretty strong imagination, if anything. But it's creepy.
Tonight, though, didn't seem to bother me. Maybe it was the music. Maybe not. But I was able to walk past the school, look in the windows from afar, and just...remember. Maybe it's been so long since I've gone there that it feels like I'm the ghost that should be haunting the school and walking the halls. Whatever the case may be, I walked past the place with nary a shiver or a goosebump. I'd stop, look, and think of what all has changed and how it was then. How it'll never again be the same school that I once went to. And how, as sad a thought as that may be, how little it seemed to bother me because it's been so long now. Maybe someday I'll go past there again and it'll strike me harder. Until then, I'll just figuratively walk the halls and wait for it to happen.
My mind was somewhere else most of the time I was out. All I really remember is that I subconsciously guided myself back home again and that the CD ended the instant I stepped in the door. That one thing was maybe the coolest event of the entire day. It couldn't have been timed more perfectly. 72 minutes after I started playing the CD, I returned home. And how.
Somewhere around 8:30 PM: More computer screwing. See the 3:00 thingie for more details.
9:30 PM: Scott -- that is, the awesome Scott who took me to see Team America -- let me borrow a few DVDs from him last weekend. This is kickass, because he and his wife have MANY, MANY DVDs and I'm always willing to watch more movies. I watched Harold and Maude tonight, which is one of the strangest and most darkly hilarious movies I've seen in a long time. If you've never heard of it, it's about a 20-year-old boy who's obsessed with death and a 79-year-old woman who's high on life who fall in love with each other. It's not your normal romantic comedy. It's funnier. And better. Check it out.
A favorite quote of mine from the movie (Harold has been performing fake grotesque suicides on himself in front of his mother. One time he hangs himself and just sings back and forth for a while, one time he just lays face down in a swimming pool, another time he dowses himself in fake blood and sprawls himself out in the bathtub. It's a very, very strange movie):
Psychiatrist: Tell me, Harold, how many of these, eh, *suicides* have you performed?
Harold: An accurate number would be difficult to gauge.
Psychiatrist: Well, just give me a rough estimate.
Harold: A rough estimate? I'd say fifteen.
Psychiatrist: Fifteen?
Harold: That's a rough estimate.
Psychiatrist: Were they all done for your mother's benefit?
Harold: No. *pause* No, I would not say "benefit."
(Just for the record, the other DVDs I borrowed were American Splendor, Mad Max, Shakespeare in Love, and Velvet Goldmine. I asked for these movies, by the way. They didn't just let me borrow random ones.)
11:00 PM: The movie is over and I decide to watch SNL for a while, because nothing else is on TV. Bad idea. Seriously. Did the writers of SNL just suddenly wake up about two years ago and say, "Hey! Our show is so good! Let's just make it SUCK for the rest of eternity!!"? It sure seems like it. It's gotten to be painful to watch. I watched through Weekend Update, then I had to turn it off because I prefer not to hurt myself if I can help it.
11:30 PM: It wasn't quite midnight at this point, but I fixed myself a snack anyway. It was a bowl of Lucky Charms. You can't beat Lucky Charms at 11:30 at night. You really can't. They're just as magically delicious at night as they are way too damn early in the morning, too! Mmm.
11:45 PM: More computer screwing. I surf around to various websites (some the same ones as earlier, some not) before deciding to write this entry.
12:12 AM: I start writing this journal entry. I know the exact time because the little box thingie at the top of the entry tells me so. The entry started off like this, "Today was a good day. Actually, today was a great day. It's been a long time since I've had a day that was so satisfying. For the first time since I can remember, the day was perfect: Nothing went wrong, I didn't have any problems, and even those tiny little minor annoyances like the cat yowling too loud or the house being too cold seemed virtually nonexistent. It was just a wonderful day. It didn't make me jubilantly happy. It made me...wholly satisfied. Not happy, not sad, not anywhere in between. Just totally satisfied. And that should be good enough for anyone."
Which is true. It should be. Today was a fantastic day for me. I hope yours was, too.
1:14 AM: I post this bitch.
11:30 AM: I finally gather enough energy to get my lazy ass out of bed. I love sleeping in on Saturday mornings. Really, there are few things greater in the world. After a solid week of having to be at school (much less out of bed) before the sun is even up, this morning was blissful. It's so great to roll over, look at the clock, see that it's 10:00 or whatever and be like, "Fuck it. I'm sleeping more," and then roll over and go back to sleep. This morning I got up at 11:30. Having gone to bed early the previous night (1:00 AM), this was a pretty good amount of sleep. I went into the day feeling rested.
12:30 PM: I'm at Twister's with my dad. I was really flippin' hungry since I hadn't eaten dinner the night before. I had a green chile cheeseburger. That was pretty yummy. For once, my dad didn't piss me off as I was eating with his dumbass conversations or whatever. But it wasn't silent either. There was some sort of communication there, even though I don't remember it. All I remember is that it was oddly tolerable.
1:45 PM: Having gotten back from eating lunch and going to the post office, my dad went up to his office to "work" (aka playing Solitaire and later bitching about his lack of productivity). This left me downstairs to do my own thang. On a whim, I sat on the couch and listened to The Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat album for its entire 76 minutes. It's not a very good album, no, but there's something about actually sitting on the couch and listening to music as I'm reading the lyrics out of the booklet. Something's just awesome about that.
3:01 PM: The CD is over, so I go upstairs and screw around on the computer for a little while. I don't remember what exactly I did, but it probably involved the keywords "hot," "sex," "broomstick," "AA battery," "boobs," "eyeball," and "narcolepsy." Or maybe I just checked my email, surfed around Myspace for a while, and read some other stuff around the 'net.
4:00 PM: The computer finally gets boring. I go to my room and decide to read the next section in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I was at Page One Too with my dad earlier this week and I saw a copy of it on the shelf for $6. Several people I know have mentioned it to me, so I figured I'd read it. My dad has basically a buttload of trade credit there, so I got the thing for free (along with a copy of Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine -- I am such a music whore).
6:15 PM: I finish the book. Yeah, this is officially the first time I've ever read a book (as in, 200+ page novel) in less than a week. Now I understand what people mean when they say they can't put a book down. I think it's a book that pretty much any thoughtful high schooler should read. It's funny, it's poignant, it's disturbing, it's very...um, detailed in certain places. But all of it seemed balanced just right. Being in high school, I know what it's like. And the guy who wrote it seemed to put everything in its place. I think what made the book great for me, though, was just the observations that the main character made and how I could relate to so much he was saying. (And isn't relating what makes pretty much anything great?)
Now if only Great Expectations was so exciting, then we'd be talking!
6:30 PM: I watched Ebert & Roeper. They were doing their worst movies of 2004. Ebert put The Village on his list! That made me happy like you can't believe. That movie sucked my balls. Roeper put Saw on his list, which I also agree with. Yuck. That movie was far too disturbing for its own good. Why is it every serial killer movie these days tries to be another Se7en? Oh well. Both Ebert and Roper put White Chicks on their lists. I remember watching, like, five minutes of that with Kim and Leah the first time we saw Napoleon Dynamite. It looked...uh, bad. Heh.
The REAL worst movie of the year was I, Robot. Neither of them even mentioned it. The bastards.
7:00 PM: About this time, Padre heads off to a party at Mr. Indie Filmmaker's apartment and leaves me home alone. Noticing it was a warm night and still in a somewhat thoughtful mood from finishing the book, I got my crap together and decided to take a walk. This walk was unique, though, because it's the first one I've taken since I got my CD player at Christmas. Naturally, I put The Cure's Disintegration in it and went on my way. I went up on that Juan Tabo dam and just stared out at the city for a while. I pressed play as soon as I got up there, and didn't stand up and walk off until the end of "Last Dance." So I sat there for the longest time, just staring...
Then I got up and walked through that neighborhood on the other side of Bear Canyon. I don't know why I did it. I just did. It just seemed like the thing to do. I had the CD player up so loud I couldn't hear anything else. It was blissful. I even ventured to walk past S.Y. Jackson and just look at it for a little while. I've said in the past that one of the creepiest things to me is an empty school at night. I have personal experiences to make that archetypal emotion even more potent, too. Ask me sometime if you haven't heard the stories. (There's one about Eisenhower, La Cueva, and Georgia O'Keefe. Take your pick.) I don't believe in ghosts, really, but there's something about schools at night that just makes me believe in them all of a sudden. Like, when everyone goes away and the sun goes down, the ghosts of students who once went there will walk the halls all night. I have a pretty strong imagination, if anything. But it's creepy.
Tonight, though, didn't seem to bother me. Maybe it was the music. Maybe not. But I was able to walk past the school, look in the windows from afar, and just...remember. Maybe it's been so long since I've gone there that it feels like I'm the ghost that should be haunting the school and walking the halls. Whatever the case may be, I walked past the place with nary a shiver or a goosebump. I'd stop, look, and think of what all has changed and how it was then. How it'll never again be the same school that I once went to. And how, as sad a thought as that may be, how little it seemed to bother me because it's been so long now. Maybe someday I'll go past there again and it'll strike me harder. Until then, I'll just figuratively walk the halls and wait for it to happen.
My mind was somewhere else most of the time I was out. All I really remember is that I subconsciously guided myself back home again and that the CD ended the instant I stepped in the door. That one thing was maybe the coolest event of the entire day. It couldn't have been timed more perfectly. 72 minutes after I started playing the CD, I returned home. And how.
Somewhere around 8:30 PM: More computer screwing. See the 3:00 thingie for more details.
9:30 PM: Scott -- that is, the awesome Scott who took me to see Team America -- let me borrow a few DVDs from him last weekend. This is kickass, because he and his wife have MANY, MANY DVDs and I'm always willing to watch more movies. I watched Harold and Maude tonight, which is one of the strangest and most darkly hilarious movies I've seen in a long time. If you've never heard of it, it's about a 20-year-old boy who's obsessed with death and a 79-year-old woman who's high on life who fall in love with each other. It's not your normal romantic comedy. It's funnier. And better. Check it out.
A favorite quote of mine from the movie (Harold has been performing fake grotesque suicides on himself in front of his mother. One time he hangs himself and just sings back and forth for a while, one time he just lays face down in a swimming pool, another time he dowses himself in fake blood and sprawls himself out in the bathtub. It's a very, very strange movie):
Psychiatrist: Tell me, Harold, how many of these, eh, *suicides* have you performed?
Harold: An accurate number would be difficult to gauge.
Psychiatrist: Well, just give me a rough estimate.
Harold: A rough estimate? I'd say fifteen.
Psychiatrist: Fifteen?
Harold: That's a rough estimate.
Psychiatrist: Were they all done for your mother's benefit?
Harold: No. *pause* No, I would not say "benefit."
(Just for the record, the other DVDs I borrowed were American Splendor, Mad Max, Shakespeare in Love, and Velvet Goldmine. I asked for these movies, by the way. They didn't just let me borrow random ones.)
11:00 PM: The movie is over and I decide to watch SNL for a while, because nothing else is on TV. Bad idea. Seriously. Did the writers of SNL just suddenly wake up about two years ago and say, "Hey! Our show is so good! Let's just make it SUCK for the rest of eternity!!"? It sure seems like it. It's gotten to be painful to watch. I watched through Weekend Update, then I had to turn it off because I prefer not to hurt myself if I can help it.
11:30 PM: It wasn't quite midnight at this point, but I fixed myself a snack anyway. It was a bowl of Lucky Charms. You can't beat Lucky Charms at 11:30 at night. You really can't. They're just as magically delicious at night as they are way too damn early in the morning, too! Mmm.
11:45 PM: More computer screwing. I surf around to various websites (some the same ones as earlier, some not) before deciding to write this entry.
12:12 AM: I start writing this journal entry. I know the exact time because the little box thingie at the top of the entry tells me so. The entry started off like this, "Today was a good day. Actually, today was a great day. It's been a long time since I've had a day that was so satisfying. For the first time since I can remember, the day was perfect: Nothing went wrong, I didn't have any problems, and even those tiny little minor annoyances like the cat yowling too loud or the house being too cold seemed virtually nonexistent. It was just a wonderful day. It didn't make me jubilantly happy. It made me...wholly satisfied. Not happy, not sad, not anywhere in between. Just totally satisfied. And that should be good enough for anyone."
Which is true. It should be. Today was a fantastic day for me. I hope yours was, too.
1:14 AM: I post this bitch.