Startling.
Elizabeth from journalism called, asking for a few group pictures and a statement.
I had a five-second debate concerning which quote I was going to give to her. I was thinking of maybe..
"Procrastination is like masturbation: You only screw yourself." - P.J. Cooper.
Or.
"Quotes are for people who can't think for themselves" - Somerset Maughn.
Both are equally offensive and aren't likely to get published anyway. So what the hell - silence is always best.
The deadline for the article is probably tomorrow; no one calls anyone on Sunday evening unless it's to save your own ass.
I feel like drinking a glass of milk to worsen my throat.

Perturbed. Disturbed. Frustrated.
I can’t deal. I’m pressured, I’m annoyed, and everything isn’t comfortable.
I need to be a vegetarian, twenty-four-seven.
But I think I prefer submissive apathy.

It's been said that truly deep literature is written with no capitalization. The punctuation's all fine and intact, but it's alright to leave out the upper-case letters. I used to type like that, you know, until I realized I was typing really, really deep.
Deepdeep-beepbeep.

March 24, 2001.
In Southern California, cold, liquor, and sex are the most alluring words you can use to describe anything.
The people are hot, listless, and too dishonest to be satisfied, so much that anything that can catch your attention from the drive is automatically good without question.
I gave off a nasally whimper down Van Nuys Boulevard.
The street is littered with odd Mexican shops, all sprawled with Spanish slogans written in barely discernable texts and colors. The spring evening is strangely warm and is a fresh change from all the gray weather we've had for the past few months; the colorful signs of the barrio radiated dancing, hazy apparitions that just seem to scream tantalizing descriptives of air-conditioning and chilled drinks - I wondered what the hell I was doing outside, and for a change, I was better off in-doors.
Underneath the arcades and overhangs of every storefront crammed a dozen figures; human-brown-sardines inching inwards for more shade despite the elbow or the considerable back step made by the gorilla in front. The can was almost as hot as the sidewalk - thank God for shadows and cold-plaster walls.
Drivers-by worsened the condition with glaring tinted windshields. It was almost some sort of sadistic exhibitionism, perhaps even natural selection. Human evolution progresses well as capitalism, you realize?

Which is, indeed, the reason why I'm so loathsome.
Envy consumes me.

The faint whirr of the ceiling fan and the dim glow of the desk light proves great company, sometimes.

March 23, 2001.
So. I've given up individualism and wafted into the teenage riot.
"Man. You can waft perfume and farts and pungent odors. But I don't think people can actually do that."
Your momma can actually do that.
"Fuck you."
I've always figured myself as chivalrous.
Lunch: Art brings up a conversation he's had in regards to shirts with plunging necklines, and just generally revealing. I was walking through Randolph at the time.
"Don't look at it", shouted a usually serene and subtle Nuria. She expressed it sincerely and was rather grim, from my understanding, as if she was genuinely disturbed by Art's promiscuity.
Promiscuity, promiscuous question - sounds like a joke to me. All of our jokes are dry and sexual; this circumstance doesn't strike me much as different and perhaps Nuria knows. She's so understanding, and kind, and thoughtful, and truly sympathetic - The last thing I'll ever want to do is to offend her.
I've seen so many guys, mutual friends, who are always dishing out raunchy comments of speculative masturbation, bondage, and dirtier stuff. And yet she greets them with smiles; she even laughs sometimes. I guess I just wanted her to give that reaction to me.
"It's rude not to peek", I said.
I'm sorry.

I've shaved off the little moustache I've never realized I've had, and my lips feel like they've been drenched in kerosene. I look kind of different.

I've completely lost track of time.
Lots have happened over the past four days, and everything was so inspiring and strong. The team was great: we've been working great, we've been acting great. We were great.
But apparently not enough.
We've been blown off by the standards set by fellow students and friends who try to think of themselves as friends, finding empathy in ridicule and consolation in I-told-you-sos. Our higher-up representatives admired it though; eighth place - third place in the district was enough for them to earn bragging rights.
"Bragging rights", she said. And I still haven't an idea what she's done for it.
I haven't an idea what I've done to deserve it.
I'm ashamed to know my teammates and I really should've done better for them, if anything. They don't deserve this. They really don't deserve this.
Over the past four days I've prayed to God about it all - about winning, about my teammates: they really weren't selfish prayers, but it feels like it's been taken the wrong way. Maybe God's punishing me for being unreasonable, perhaps I've asked too much for something so little.
And I feel sick. I feel sick for trying so hard but getting so little in return. I feel sick for playing sick days under lies and studying, and getting sick of studying, and being sick from studying.
I wander around in circles as time flies by, really.

Recap. March 17, 2001.
Saturday evening was spent with barely anything in mind, the highlights being my punching and denting the bathroom wall and an all too familiar evening in Acapulco.
Jen's invited lots of people to spend the evening dining with us. It felt strange to have strangers around while I was brooding over the dismal results of the relay - my dismal results. I've been brooding over it the whole time spent on walking over to the restaurant, and very apparent: Nagle, Meg, Altair, and Mrs. Tanedo had tried to give me some consolation, and I really appreciate it. I regret not telling them anything or even expressing a gesture of thanks, but I hope they realize how much it all really meant to me.
A touch on the shoulder, a pat on the back, a warm smile, is all I really need to feel wonderful, and they all mean so much to me now.
I tried my best to be cheerful in the restaurant - I spewed off a few dry jokes in front of Christine and her mother, who casually laughed and took me as satisfied. Meg saw right through me though, and she seemed genuinely concerned with me; she asked me if I was all right. Twice.
The first time around I replied with an "I'm ok".
Or what I hoped to be a reassuring and confident "I'm ok".
She asked again and I gave away with honesty. But she really shouldn't endure my sulking.

The booth across from our table was occupied by a couple of blatantly gay looking guys. One of them kept eyeing me and giving smiles as I drank iced tea - it's very disturbing, but sickeningly kind of flattering at the same time.
Most of us watched animated pornography for the rest of the evening after sitting through parts of Fight Club, so I don't completely doubt my sexuality. Because I enjoyed it. Man, I enjoyed it, and my libido is thanking me for the hours spent on violent psychobabble, the animated tits and ass, and endless womanizing through the early morning.

Eh.

March 13, 2001.
Ohg. I wasted life today and buried it in resource material. My train of thought was practically derailed throughout the entire day as it kept wandering around the place, idly thinking of things to do that I can't do, stuff that I normally wouldn't be able to think of but suddenly can; weird, contrasting things: Boston Museum of Fine Arts this, quaternion that, the atoms of Democritus, erotic Western European paintings, and animistic everythings.
Ohg. So it wasn't very productive after all.
I'm going to miss psychology again tomorrow, and it's testing day. The only thing I've produced was a short, ten-problem exam sheet that was very fun to do. I had little side-quotes and footnotes with little on-line ascii faces every now and then to throw off the test-taker from finding it as a hard exam. Hopefully it's not, but at least it's cheerful looking.
And now I'm doing entries. I don't feel very guilty with this, seeing as how it's actually good practice for essays. Rhetoric stuff, obscure writing technical stuff, lots of imagery: all that and thinking fast enough to produce a great paper in less than an hour is essential. I think I've done this long enough to safely assume that it's growing on me.
The doctor offered great advice on Friday concerning thesis statements. Address the prompt and cite examples, and the essay will pretty much write itself. No need to be fancy and dramatic, just address it. That certainly takes the fun out of it, but I guess conformity is mandatory for earning points.
No wonder Nagle hates speech-writing so much.

Dilemma: I've got a gazillion ideas for new art, and new songs, and new layouts, and new stuff to write about.
But I haven't the time because I'm supposed to be studying.

Damn it.

March 12, 2001.
Man, I love productive days. Work is normally a pain in the ass, but the gratification you get from actually doing it is priceless. I've just finished summarizing, sorting, and footnoting the immune system sections from three different textbooks, all of which carries about thirty pages per related chapter.
So. That's a lot. And I'm so very proud of myself for doing it!
Useless, however. I guess I really didn't need to put every single thread of text into my own words, but I'm sure I won't regret doing so once competition sets in.
Which reminds me of the psychology material I sorted out. I'm the only person in that class who actually puts the lectures onto paper, but the output comes horribly disfigured and jumbled: perhaps a little too misleading from the actual writings in the textbook. Toy had to interrupt me in mid sentence on more than three occasions, each of which brought up a statistics related discussion, say, the number of fifteen year old Ukrainian teenagers engaged in premarital sex compared to America's, yet there are higher numbers of American teenage pregnancies. Reason? It meandered into twenty minutes of discussion.
Nngh.
A few of them seemed to have a good time watching my loathing on the pedestal though. I wholeheartedly understand - someone once mentioned that I was like a cartoon.
I'd probably be Eeyore or something, if I had a choice.
Eventually the discussion tapered off into something a little more personal and the question on hand became one that involved the hgm student body, something along the lines of asking for the percentage of sexually active students within my class. Everyone feigned ignorance for the sake of anonymity, but we all had a slight idea of who was fucking around. And it's sickening. It's sickening to know that geeks like us are into that sort of stuff. My lecture turned into gossip.
Brian put it off bluntly, and rather well: "Not in the hgm."
We're a bunch of desk-pushing geek-children of business yuppies.
Microsoft fodder. Suburban middle-class. Dot-com prospectors and shit.
And melodramatic to boot.

I'm like an open book, yet everyone prefers television.

In-box: 44 unread messages.
Trash-bin, ten minutes from now: 44 unread messages.
Contribute? noa@runbox.com.

March 10, 2001.
The refrigerator's been on the fritz for quite some time now. I didn't think it much of a problem since the door was always slightly ajar and never coming to a full shut whenever someone opens the fridge. It's no big deal, really. All you have to do is push the door in a little harder and that's not much of an inconvenience. The ice cube dispenser stopped working years ago when I stuffed sports bottles in the ice compartment, but no one ever uses it or ever whines about having to open the freezer and reaching in for the ice. Have my parents finally decided to shell out dollars for the sake of convenience? No.
Also, the freezer door has to be pushed in every time someone wants to use the chilled water function, but again, no one complains. And the little bumper decoration on the bottom keeps falling off. But, eh.
Last night I noticed that the freezer light went off and there's a bunch of shaved ice all over the little compartments and trays. Maybe someone tried to use the ice cube dispenser again.
The light certainly needed to get fixed though.
The repairman came over at ten am for an estimate and said something or other about the faulty gasket. My mother had inquired earlier through Paul, the other half of the business, to get a fixed amount for the replacement gasket and the service. "150", Paul said. When you give my mother a number, it had better be the number.


repairman, in heavy Russian accent: 175 for gasket.
mother, in slight Filipino accent: Paul said it's 150 for the gasket.
repairman: Paul knows nothing. 175 for gasket.
mother: That's over my budget. I'm not going over 150.
repairman: I'm here to make money.
mother: Paul said 150.
repairman: Approximately 150.
mother, accent begins to grow thicker: "150. Period", he said.
repairman: don't get nervous. Paul doesn't give price, the manufacturer does.
mother, frustrated: I'm not nervous!

Repeat, x5, for a whole hour.


I was in the living room at the time, but that's about right.
She's going to buy a gasket from Florida.

Friday, March 9, 2001

Today, it's like everything was made and born, just for me, and I feel as though I'm at the center of the entire universe. Ever had a perfect day? I kind of had one, just a few minutes ago.
The statistics test went rather well and I made it through the class feeling unscathed. I always get this premonition that someone's always out to get me in statistics, just because. Following, English literature went just as well; the doctor hadn't caught me without my eighth edition copy of Sound and Sense, or perhaps she was just giving me some leeway - it's my happy day, you know. And I think she knows.
The psychology lecture that I had briskly prepared during government was a waste. A little before noon, I had just about had enough of Erikson and the unmistakable objectiveness behind the pseudo-science, all the while Jim Crow flickered on the television, beckoning me to drop the textbook I was secretly footnoting and to write about the unconstitutionality of the American Constitution.
I'm glad the discussion yesterday digressed so much into Eugenia's tailored personality - I'm calling it so because it's frighteningly similar to Ayn Rand. Today's session began where yesterday's left off and the entire class was just that: a free period of discussion and capitalist bashing. Anal Toy didn't mind at all, and as a matter of fact, he had a phone conference, a drink of water, and a few laughs at the "minimum wage without the assistance of welfare is sufficient for the practical American" theory. I was compelled to back that opinion up until someone had to mention that 40 cents a meal is hardly a proper course for a malnutrition afflicted third world baby. It was for the best that I say nothing before I lose any more integrity.
The computer science instructor tried to encourage me to learn network installation so he wouldn't have to pay anyone. He gave me a 900-page testbook as a present.
Afterwards I hung out with Arthur and his girlfriend Lisa, who complemented us for being taller than her. I told Joanne that she made me sick. Then I stole a chicken dumpling from Allen and threw the Chinese take-out box on the pavement, because there's nothing left but soggy vegetables.

Ah.

ST: One Sweet World - Dave Matthews Band.

March 7, 2001.
It's been a busy day and I'm almost glad that I didn't feign sickness. I started a presentation on the comparative moral development of boys, girls, and their further mental growth as they transcend through adolescence, the teenage years - basically Erikson's progression through the aging mindset. It isn't quite finished; I should be finishing it sometime tonight/to-morrow since the lecture swerved to a half-hour discussion on Heinz's dilemma. Then something about the lack of sex-ed in third world countries and their problems with overpopulation. Then something about Magic Johnson and the medical industrialism of America. And then something about Eugenia being a cynical capitalist pig-woman, I don't really remember. I sat the day away, nodding my head and calling on people. If anything, being a teacher is fun.
Which is a very funny thing. I thought I'd never have to do this chud ever again, having comparative government in my program where psychology used to be.
But hey. More psych. Ah.
I should let the students bicker while I pretend to understand.
Hopefully I can manage to write up my entire lecture tonight. I have the George W. Bush syndrome when it comes to oral presentations: it's something very close to the reaction a deer gets when faced against a pair of speeding headlights at three in the morning. I really can't express it differently, but I'm sure you can tell it looks pathetic and stupid and dumb at the same time. So I need to read the stuff I'm going to say, otherwise I wouldn't be able to say anything. Dig?
Eric's going through a stage in moral dilemma, particularly, ego identity versus moral diffusion. He seems to have jumbled them both since he's identifying himself and his problems in other people's whining. Or at least I think he is. I hope I haven't been giving him any ideas with my confusticating and fucking around with complaints, because that isn't a cool thing to do.

Yeah, I don't understand it either. But hopefully he will.

Disappoint. Nagle isn't joining us today for lunch. It's the last day of vacation and it's best that we throw something fun so we wouldn't waste our final hours of free time shitting around. But I truly understand his not accompanying us for family reasons, and it's best that he does. Amazing guy, him. He's far too considerate to be real and I wish him the best.
I feel warm and tranquil. And weird.

I feel like kicking a puppy.

No, not really. That's horrible.
But kind of.
Yeah, kind of.

March 04, 2001.
violent beat (12:47:42 AM): howdeh!
lOnesOul92 (12:50:58 AM): wazza!?
violent beat (12:51:10 AM): what's eating you tonight?
lOnesOul92 (12:51:40 AM): fishheads.
lOnesOul92 (12:51:42 AM): and you?
violent beat (12:51:59 AM): heads with fish.
lOnesOul92 (12:54:04 AM): the variety appalls me
violent beat (12:54:21 AM): life is usually like that.

Grim, grim, grim.

I'm relieved that I've finished off a Cliff Hanger for school. It's on Catch-22, a terribly interesting book that I've whored for 50 points in an English Literature class. I honestly wonder if Joseph Heller had pictured his book being butchered and pulled apart by students and teachers who try to over-intellectualize everything for the sake of analyzing and rationalizing for years to come in English Literature classes.
And for 50 points!
I've just torn apart the mystique, the style and practically the entirety of his essence from this book. It just isn't very artsy anymore.
Rephrase, it just isn't very natural anymore.
Or maybe I'm just a lazy philistine.

Philistine. Jesus.