Here I am again.

Valkien has died. He is gone forever. It's sad, but it's true, and it happened around Thanksgiving, which means I've been without a personal computer for about a month, which is why I haven't updated. Well, I guess I probably wouldn't have updated anyway, but whatever. Anyway, his replacement is called Lux, and that's a fairly asexual name, but I'm gonna call it a 'she' because... she's sleek.

Mostly, I'm afraid of her. Too much of everything. Too much memory, too fast, too big. Widescreen wallpaper is a bitch to find. But I'm trying to enjoy it because... well I just am. The boyz, who are awesome, were able to salvage all my music and stuff from Valkien's hard drive, so that's good. It was, of course, after I'd already gotten rid of the 40,000 words I'd done for NaNoWriMo. But I had finished crying about that last month, though it still hurts writing it. There's an actual physical wireless switch on the computer and it took me an hour to realize they were talking about that when they told me I couldn't connect to the wireless internet because it was turned off. I felt silly afterwards.

But now here I am. Overwhelmed by work because that's what I'm doing, working through vacation. Money is important, but this is getting out of hand. It upsets me because the time I have to myself isn't to myself because I'm tired and cranky. I should spend more time with my friends but it's just like... I don't wanna get up. I've been on my feet all day and stuff. That's a poor excuse. But still. So yeah.

When I get back to Pittsburgh, I'll have a head again. Right now, I'm just... here. Not in a sad way, just in a... here way.

So when I'm not sleeping... I'm pretty much writng. I don't think I've typed this much in so short a time in my life. It's effecting my hands and my mind. I'm gonna have old spinister hands by the time this is over, and I can't concentrate in class at all. I fall asleep unless I'm writing because thinking about what I should be writing makes me sleepy.

Anyway... WEIRD DREAM.

Somehow, Dan had to fake like he was a baseball player to make some sort of money (he was wearing a suit whenever I saw him, I think it might have been less-than-honest work... of course since he was faking like he was a baseball player) and me and my horribly misbehaving cousins had to watch the game. We brought notebook paper with us, mostly so I could write, but also so they could draw or something if they weren't interested in the game. Apparently an old woman who was sitting in the row behind us also brought some notebook paper, and one of my cousins accidentally used some of hers.

I told her I was sorry and that I would buy her a new pack and she looked at me all disgusted and said "Yeah, if you can afford it" and I'm just like "you're racist and old and smelly. Jerk!" And then I got really upset and went to go throw something away, but whenever I turned around there she was. And she tried to apologize and give me a new pair of slippers (because I'd lost one of my other pair while I was running down the stairs) and I was still really pissed and so I was like "I'd just rather have one slipper, thank you."

Then I had to try to find my way back into the stadium, but apparently it was connected to a big fat mall and a bigger fatter mansion. I got lost and I'm running through all these gardens and stores and finally come across this kind of garden party. Dan's there, eating from the buffet, which is 93% off from 3-3:10. Good thing it's 3:02 and Dan's packing it in since usually, the buffet is $100. There's a bunch of different meat in different sauces and all of a sudden, that old woman is there. She owns the mansion.

Cuddy from House was also there. Dan was making sex eyes at her.

And now I'm awake.

I just had a pretty weird dream and I'm typing it up before I forget it, and then going back to sleep because unlike a normal person, I didn't go to bed till 5am.

So anyway, it started with puppies. They were all different colors, I think the one called Rosewood was the color of red velvet cake. Anyway, I picked out one of these puppies to be mine and then I had a job interview in this big building. Elevators come up a lot in my dreams for some reason, and I'm always afraid of them and I'm always on them forever. As it turns out, it's not a job interview, it's class registration. I'm finally able to get off the elevator (by then it was actually an escalator) and I already had everything set up, I just had to wait in line, which wasn't half as long as it should have been. There was an older woman in front of me who had forgotten her number and I guess my mind wandered while I was waiting because all of a sudden they were calling my name realy loud. I thought I'd seen something at the window.

But as soon as I started to give them my number, I wake up in this basement kind of thing with a bunch of people, most notably, Alex. I think all the boyz are there, and then some random amalgamtion of people you only see thrown together in a real horror situation: old guy, young guy and his fiance, a scared kid, a cheerleader. Actually, I don't know where the cheerleader came from, but she was in full uniform (which kept changing colors) and she was Kirsten Dunst.

*stops typing to listen for tell-tale noises. doesn't like being alone when she wakes up from a potentially scary dream... isn't sure she feels better, but will continue nonetheless. has too vivid an imagination to be alone somewhere with unexplained strange sounds...*

Anyway, we're all in this basement because there's been some sort of zombie/vampire attack. None of us have weapons and none of us are doing anything but huddling (which is really how I should have known it was a dream. the boyz would definitely be going all out) and finally I volunteered to go up and see what all the fuss was about. Of course, I get chased by these things and somehow find out that they like girls with short hair. Long-haired girls aren't touched. I guess I have long hair. I travel through some kind of catacombs to get back to the basement when I'm persued by one especially cognizant vampire-zombie. I was being followed around by Kirsten Dunst, and she gets bitten before we make it back into the basement. By the time we get there it's just Alex and some other infected girl left.

We throw out the infected girl and try to make sure Dunst doesn't change. The guy who was persuing me lets us know that we can stay in the basement, unharmed, for $24.99 a month. Dunst, while trying to ward off one of the vampire-zombies, turns. I get some blood on my finger, which apparently means I'm going to turn soon, too. I can already see it spreading, but I wash my hands and hide it as we kick Dunst out. And I turn to Alex and go "Well... I guess we really were meant to be," all the while, of course hiding the fact that I'm infected.

The End.

Have you ever read something that was painful because it was beautiful?

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient. I'm 20 pages into it and I want to cry because every single image is perfect.

On the desert and its people: "These were water people. Even today caravans look like a river. Still, today it is water who is the stranger here. Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth" (19).

I talked to Herbie today. I think he got it.

I also talked to Keely today. She says my writing is good... and she meant it. So now it doesn't matter that I'm cramming for my neuroscience exam tomorrow because Keely said I'm good and she wasn't just being nice. Woot!

Sometimes... there's just not enough broccoli.

I'm just pissed at the world.

I'm sure it's a lot of things. I'm sure I'm all hormonal and bitchy for a real reason, not just because. But right now it just feels like everything's pissing me off. Not Dan, but most other things and people.

I despise workshopping in class. Everytime I say anything I'm sure it's the wrong thing. People don't read stories like I do, which is fine because I already feel like everyone is smarter than I am. But just picking apart a piece of student writing makes me feel like I'm doing someone a disservice. Sure, it's probably helpful, but those pompous assholes who say things are always so... pompous and assholey. I can pick out who'll like one thing and who'll dislike another. I know what they're going to say and it pisses me off because people keep talking about taking a new angle or making something "fresh," but it's really hard to write something new when your audience is a bunch of writers. Of course they've seen every fucking thing between them, they read for a living. It just makes me physically uncomfortable.

Herbie pisses me off, but I can't seem to get rid of him. It's like he only takes me seriously when we're talking about writing, and even then he's just humoring me. When I say something like "Herbie, I don't want to be part of your writer's community" or "who uses a word like 'scofflaw' in casual conversation? Seriously?" he just laughs like I'm making a joke. But I'm not kidding, I really want to blow his head off whenever he talks. Even online I can't get away from that... ew factor.

( Example )

I don't know what else. People online are bugging me, all this board drama and things that make me roll my eyes so often I'm sure they'll fall out of my head. I can't even describe it, but I'm walking around all clenched and stuff because everything is annoying to me.

On a completely different note, I want to be pregnant. Not necessarily soon, but I'm in this really... motherly mood. I want to be that happy fat woman sitting in front of the open refrigerator at 3am eating ice cream out of the carton that's balanced on her belly. It's probably mostly an excuse to eat whatever I want whenever I want and not feel like I'm a fat slob (which is how I feel when I eat anything, now), but it's more than that. I want a family. I want to play music and put the headphones on my stomach and I want to be all drugged up and angry during the birth and break a couple of Dan's fingers. I want to name my baby and go to a family gathering and have them pass him or her around and say how cute they are. I want Dan to wake up during the first four months in the middle of the night and get the baby to stop crying. I want to breast feed. I even want dirty diapers and stains on my favorite t shirts where the baby spit up after burping. Not soon. But eventually.

Eric told me I need a pet. That's probably true.

Also, Cheryl Brawley from high school sent me this random Facebook message. "Hey, you probably don't remember me, how are you?" And of course I remember Cheryl Brawley. I remember almost everybody from high school because I hated high school. And so I responded like so:

"We played viola together, you were Danielle Boone's stand partner in seventh and eighth grade. You really didn't like Cassidy, who was my stand partner, and so you were mean to me, too. You hung out with Kristen Brazzel in high school. For some reason I never understood, she really hated me, and you were mean to me because she was. Those memory is probably biased, but I don't remember ever having been as mean to you as you were to me. But yes, I remember you. And I'm doing ok. Pittsburgh is nice in the way that Shaker is nice, but there's a lot more to do. That might just be college. I'm studying fiction writing, which just means I'm not doing anything and getting a a degree for it. I'm gonna have to go to grad school, I want to be a professor when I grow up. Isn't that funny, we're 21 now, and I'm still saying 'when I grow up.' I'm engaged to Dan Vann. My mom thinks it's funny, I came to college and said I was going to find my own Dwayne Wayne, like on A Different World, and now I'm engaged to a guy named Dan Vann. He's nice, he's really funny, smart. He's studying computer science at Caregie Mellon and he's a football player. We're getting married after I graduate. I can't think of anything else. What about you, how are you doing?"

She responded with "oh. I didn't think you remembered me." Of course on the facebook it says she's from Cleveland, OH instead of what college she's going to, but she was always as dumb as she was mean. And in her profile, it also says "respect others and they will respect you." What a crock. Just thinking back to high school pisses me off more. I wish I could forget Cheryl Brawley or Kristen Brazzel or anyonee lse who made those four years of my life suck so badly. But I can't, and the reminder is just making me hate everybody more.

And James's girlfriend. I'm sorry James. The problem is that she's great when they're together, but when they're not (which is markedly more often) she treats him like trash. He spends all this time on the phone dealing with her bullshit and it makes him sad and I want to strangle her, but she was in the apartment with me and the boys for hours yesterday and didn't do anything worthy of a punch to the face. And I know that's an asshole thing for me to say, but she talks in this tiny little cute voice and I have no reason to want to kick her.

Dan went to New York last week interviewing for Xanga, and tomorrow he'll be going to Seattle until Friday to look at Microsoft. Next month, it's Amazon, and they've already offered him an insane amount of money to start. I don't want to think about next year without him, and I'm scrambling to look at graduate schools in Seattle because I don't want to be away from him for so long. But I also want to go for the biggies, like Michigan and Iowa, and even Pitt's pretty good. I don't want this to be one of those things where I have to choose between career and a man. Granted, I'm engaged to this man and the plan is that when I graduate, we'll get married. It would suck to have a long-distance marriage. I already have this secret fear of him being out of town and sleeping around while he's in New York and Seattle even though there's no proof and I know he'd never do that in reality. Maybe that's part of the reason I'm pissed, that these weekends alone are just a taste of what's going to happen next year when he's got this exciting career and I'm still in school, and signing up for another 2 years of it, at least. What happens if the only offers I get to teach are somewhere other than Seattle? That's too far in the future, I'm not going to think of that right now.

But yeah, fuck you, world.

So before I go on a rant, I have to talk about this dream I had last night. I was working at this baseball stadium, but it was more than a baseball stadium. Like... it was owned by the mafia or something. The only rule was that we couldn't date coworkers. If you did, they killed you. I was dating Dan, who was also working there. So we ran away back in time to high school to hide. Everyone else was younger, but we were the same age. I was taking classes with professors I have now, and one day I accidentally bumped into a female janitor who was younger than me. I apologized like people apologize when they accidentally bump into each other and I thought it was done, but she followed me to class and got really snippy about it. I apologized profusely and when that didn't work I was like "Yo, what's your deal?" and she hit me over the head with a chair. Seriously, this janitor kicked my ass and then when I thought it was over, she broke a window with her fist and started cutting me all over my face. It hurt a little, but I didn't stop her until she cut my fingers. I need those for writing. The end.

So about Herbie. He doesn't read lj, it's below him, so I'm not worried about him reading this, and even if he did... whatever. This kid. OMFG, this kid.

He's not really a kid, he's 25. I used to really like him. We met in my Intro to Fiction class a couple years ago and we both hated the professor and so it was really easy to talk to him. Sure, he sounds like he should be on National Public Radio when he talks and he purposely uses huge words in scholastic situations, but he was nice enough. A gentleman, the kind of guy who opens doors and stands on the outside of the sidewalk when you walk down the street in case a car comes by and splashes you. Genuine.

We didn't really start spending time together until this semester now that we're in another fiction class together. We mostly talked online and said that we should spend some time outside of class, but we never did. Recently it's become a sort of routine for us to have lunch after class and talk about writing and a bunch of other stuff. And I've suddenly realized how much... I can't stand him.

I told Addy the first reason: he suffered through two and a half episodes of Firefly because he "enjoys how passionate [I] am about it." No, he can't possibly just like Firefly. It's below him. Everything is below him. He's a scholar, he uses all those big words all the time. Seriously. There's no slang for him, no casual speech. You know, Andrew knows a bunch of words and he still talks like a human. But no, with Herbie everything has to have subtext. He refuses to see Sin City because it's "all style and no substance." Nothing can be cool just because it's cool. It's so weird. You meet people who are just style and no substance, those hair-twirling chickies who've only ever picked up Cosmo and complain about The Things They Carried because they don't know about guns. But I've never met anybody who was the other way around, who was ALL substance and no fun. That's Herbie.

And he's got this thing with Dan. Not only has he mentioned on more than one occasion (jokingly, of course) that he and I would make a far better match and Dan and I do. After all, Dan is uncultured. He doesn't like to go to the theater or orchestra concerts. He can't understand that Dan can be smart without being completely and totally cerebral. Dan's also fun and awesome and hilarious. He's witty. And Herbie will never understand that. And that bothers the crap outta me.

And for someone so concerned with subtext, he's very superficial when it comes to women. He just broke up with his girlfriend of two years (who looks like Jessica Rabbit, by the way) and he was so ready to start dating this one girl in our class who doesn't even talk. All she does is twirl her hair and look around aimlessly, but he's convinced she's sitting on this "well-spring of knowledge." He wants her to have subtext, but even in her Facebook profile it clearly states that one of her interests is twirling her hair. And he's saying Firefly and Heroes are beneath me. He told me today that he's trying to get me away from all that pop culture because I'm "capable of so much more." I can be a writer and also be a person. I can write something completely seperate from something I've seen on television. But it's like I have potential and he's convinced he can make me better. It makes me sick.

Am I being unreasonable here?

And of course, we're having lunch on Thursday. I must be masochistic.

This is how Columns ruins my life:


You see that? That level 102? That's mine. I have a friggen paper to write!
(sorry guys, my lj-cut won't work!)