His grandfather at the dinner table in the next room, the topic of nursing homes:

"Some of them are really nice places. I don't know ... they're depressing places. You walk through and there's people in the hallways with their heads down ... They're really depressing."

get to bed, I've said for an hour

At 10:15pm on Christmas Eve, I listened to Hanson's 'Snowed In', mixed the dry ingredients of sugar molasses cookies into the wet, and smoothed the confectioners sugar which encased the chocolate rum balls. My mother was in the next room, she wrapped presents, watched 'A Christmas Story' four times, and drank burgundy wine from a goblet made for her wedding. I was not allowed to go into that room, so whichever questions or comments we made to each other, we stood in the hallway to say. Watson enjoyed those exchanges for their approximation to the door. He walked the beaten path between the kitchen and living room to pursue the possibility of going for an unnecessary walk. Lake was upstairs in her bedroom, directly above the kitchen, to wrap the last of her gifts, and, more likely, spent most of it on the floor with my uncle's new lady puppy, Sandy. Meanwhile, James did not tell Sandy how adorable she is, but rather, laid in a mad slumber which he gave into around 8pm. My father did the opposite -- he worked on a court case in his office. I looked over at the time and thought to write this, then came 10:16pm.

Today, I've thought to write about plenty of things. But, thinking of the general topics - the introductory words make me so angry I won't stress myself on this eve. Ticks me off so much!

on November 20th, 2007 04:07 am:

New York is extraordinary. New York is autumn air and winter coats, men escort their mothers across avenues while other men drive taxis and talk to their wives with bluetooth telephones, restaurant doors open and bouquet the chilled area with good foods, babies bundled in all sorts of unnecessary layers wobble about like penguins on wet leaves across central park's paths, jolly red cheeked tourists with christmas tree arms decorated with shopping bags like branches holding bulbs, and each business and salesman glow spectacular. Everything smells clean and genial. I love anything good and everyone giving, and maybe it's the smell of hot chocolate on my nose or apple cider over my lip, but it seems like all things are redolent of goodness, good favour, good taste, good humour. I love New York.

I suck at madlibs

Morning lit by a blue moon; irradiated the earth's first seasonal frost. I approached the lustre gingerly. Watson eyed me. He stopped to examine dead magnolia leaves, which set him a few paces behind, as he found me an oddity in a hat that was best to be watched from afar. My walk was silent until I reached the field. Flower bulbs beneath the ground were unassailable by means of thick rime. My paddock boots made a sonorous crack on a pine cone and I looked over to see a tabby cat lay idly between two white pine trees. I threw a strobile near to scout out that it lived, and it did. It ran away with such might that Watson didn't dare make it a game. Again, he eyed me.
      I suppose it's to be expected, I thought. I also think you look funny in a hat.
I returned home, made myself cream of wheat with honey, and ate it by the fireplace.

For me, Word of the Day has always been felicitous on the days that I've chosen to read them.

ameliorate \uh-MEEL-yuh-rayt\, transitive verb:
1. To make better; to improve.

Scarce territories of my innards remain cold. I feel a chill stir like they are empty tundras left only for icicles and lichen. Under rare conditions would I walk across that terrain. Thinking to write of it makes me feel hated, and colder. I so would like to take a handful of light to it. I'd curse it and release the warmth like a plague. The ice would melt and the dwarf shrubs would grow to something greater.

There are other places that remain warm and I curse them as well. I wish them to feel discontent and furious, yet they feel humbly loving.

07, oct 07

My father greeted me by the greenhouse with a red lantern, then lead me through the rooms toward the back porch. Lights hung from the trees visible outside. Grapes and acorns on the table with a Spider-man cake and black cherry ice cream. A basket of entertaining hats. An old movie played in the adjoining room. We danced to my own music collection. Watson chased balloons. James photographed the joy, equipped with an orange filter I advised. Dan told verbose jokes. Tim held my hand. Papa looked sweet with his book on lap - he told stories and we discussed my book on saints. Mum spun around, brought up the topic of cake numerous times. Lake smiled shyly.

...
Lake made breakfast for me, but I was too sleepy to get out of bed, so Tim ate it. We spent the afternoon in bed. The previous night we ate steak like kings and avoided Mexican foods.

I just cut an engorged brown dog tick out of Watson's head with a hot blade.

My favourite seats to sit in are the ones from which I can swing my feet, because my abnormally long legs couldn't do it in the normally low seats of grade school. I'm sitting in my father's office chair, swinging my feet, and listening to Bill Withers' "Lovely Day" while he looks for a mahoogma. It's about time that I shower.

Oh my gosh

Yesterday, my grandmother said to me, "That's something to know, isn't it? Every time you have a birthday, I'm a year older."

Thank you, tooth ache

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current president of Iran, came to my school a week ago. Hitherto tonight's insomnolence, I didn't care what the man had to say, but I am glad I read the transcript, for the introduction given by Lee Bollinger, Columbia University's president, has benefited me a great pride. So, I list my favourite excerpts:

It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.

To be clear on another matter - this event has nothing whatsoever to do with any “rights” of the speaker but only with our rights to listen and speak. We do it for ourselves. We do it in the great tradition of openness that has defined this nation for many decades now. We need to understand the world we live in, neither neglecting its glories nor shrinking from its threats and dangers. It is consistent with the idea that one should know thine enemies, to have the intellectual and emotional courage to confront the mind of evil and to prepare ourselves to act with the right temperament. In the moment, the arguments for free speech will never seem to match the power of the arguments against, but what we must remember is that this is precisely because free speech asks us to exercise extraordinary self- restraint against the very natural but often counter-productive impulses that lead us to retreat from engagement with ideas we dislike and fear. In this lies the genius of the American idea of free speech.

Lastly, in universities, we have a deep and almost single-minded commitment to pursue the truth. We do not have access to the levers of power. We cannot make war or peace. We can only make minds. And to do this we must have the most full freedom of inquiry.

Over the last two weeks, your government has released Dr. Haleh Esfandiari and Parnaz Axima; and just two days ago Kian Tajbakhsh, a graduate of Columbia with a PhD in urban planning. While our community is relieved to learn of his release on bail, Dr. Tajbakhsh remains in Teheran, under house arrest, and he still does not know whether he will be charged with a crime or allowed to leave the country. Let me say this for the record, I call on the President today to ensure that Kian Tajbaksh will be free to travel out of Iran as he wishes. Let me also report today that we are extending an offer to Dr. Tajbaksh to join our faculty as a visiting professor in urban planning here at his Alma Mater, in our Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. And we hope he will be able to join us next semester.

The arrest and imprisonment of these Iranian Americans for no good reason is not only unjustified, it runs completely counter to the very values that allow today’s speaker to even appear on this campus.

But at least they are alive.

According to Amnesty International, 210 people have been executed in Iran so far this year – 21 of them on the morning of September 5th alone. This annual total includes at least two children – further proof, as Human Rights Watch puts it, that Iran leads the world in executing minors.

There is more.

Iran hanged up to 30 people this past July and August during a widely reported suppression of efforts to establish a more open, democratic society in Iran. Many of these executions were carried out in public view, a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a party.

In a December 2005 state television broadcast, you described the Holocaust as a “fabricated” “legend.” One year later, you held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers.

For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda. When you come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.

You should know that Columbia is a world center of Jewish studies and now, in partnership with the YIVO Institute, of Holocaust studies. Since the 1930s, we’ve provided an intellectual home for countless Holocaust refugees and survivors and their children and grandchildren. The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history. Because of this, and for many other reasons, your absurd comments about the “debate” over the Holocaust both defy historical truth and make all of us who continue to fear humanity’s capacity for evil shudder at this closure of memory, which is always virtue’s first line of defense.

Let me close with this comment. Frankly, and in all candor, Mr. President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. But your avoiding them will in itself be meaningful to us. I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mindset that characterizes so much of what you say and do. Fortunately, I am told by experts on your country, that this only further undermines your position in Iran with all the many good-hearted, intelligent citizens there. A year ago, I am reliably told, your preposterous and belligerent statements in this country (as in your meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations) so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens that this led to your party’s defeat in the December mayoral elections. May this do that and more.

I am only a professor, who is also a university president, and today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better.

Lyubov Bistreff stood alone outside the gates, holding a sign that read “Second Generation Holocaust Survivor.” She was 11 years old, she said, when she fled the Holocaust with her mother, two siblings, and one suitcase. “How can he deny it?” she asked. “I’m a witness. I remember everything.”


In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

The devil speed him! no man's pie is freed
From his ambitious finger.

By day:       Magenta, the sky to aviate. 7 o'clock illuminated on my mobile phone just as I had closed my eyes for the night's initial sleep. I woke, three hours later, aching from filth; my hair was greasy, my fingernails garnered ink and dirt, my skin had the balm of old coconut and sweat, and my muscles pounded from exertion. "I'll get something sweet to eat," I thought. Ergo I bartered the remaining mouthwatering hours of Sunday morning sleep for something with which I can actually satisfy my tongue. Hot shower with an open window. Asquith & Somerset soap. Squinted at the sun upon first step outdoors. My father said with a Bulgarian accent, "Our daughter has become a creature of the night..." This has been an ongoing joke since I first started falling into strange sleeping cycles at 14. Poppyseed bagel with butter and a Sobe Coolatta. I took small bites and chewed slowly, crossed legs, heavy eyes, humming in my head. I watched cars and the waddling walks of many a passerby. I know nothing about car models, but I can generally guess the 2 year vicinity of its creation based on the details. I made photograph prints; one for my father to hand colour, two for my mother, six for James. Lake and I went to lunch, ordered the same soup, different drinks. She's really the only one to find me so funny.

By night:       Two hour nap (dreamt of Metropolitan steps, friendly phantoms who cause the racket on my roof, kissing the fingertips of my precious in the French restaurant, and fighting. No less than four times I woke to glance the moving shadows outside my window. Peter Pan.)
cont'd

If I would be impassive. If I would be less. If I would make up my mind. If I would express my composition. If I would be impassive.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.

        My mother so often said to Spike, when he was not dead, "We should have named you," whichever sweet or sour name of the hour, that we have adherently extended Watson's name to a length I cannot recite.
        The afternoon was governed by whim. Consequently, we rode over the rivers, past the wood, and through the mountains to our grandparents' foreign home. It was two in the morning when we arrived - roughly seven hours past their bedtime - and we were no less awake. I gave my grandmother a mug from the Bronx Zoo, and my grandfather an old piece of jewelry on which an emblematic H had been engraved. Frazzled and markedly pleased, they left to share their bed during a time that my grandfather goes straight into a sound sleep, and my grandmother reads by flashlight for hours. As they did, Lake and I sat huddled together on a patchwork settee and shared a brownie she first tested for peanut butter. We spent two hours looking through an "I Spy" book and never found the duck. I dressed into my grandmother's nightgown and we tip-toed quietly, past the door with a covered hole induced by the punch of my then teenage uncle, into the deep, dark room redolent of the trees it is so close beside. Watson plopped by the crooked door, his nose aligned with the only exposed sliver of light. My mobile phone never seems to have more than one bar of service when visiting my grandparents, so I fruitlessly leaned toward the window, and whispered my good nights to Tim. In the hardship of being kept awake against your will, there is only one delightful exception, and that is being kept awake because your little sister will not stop laughing.

"Actually, there is no graffiti on our building..."
"There is now..."

I hate television at 4 in the morn. The only enjoyable sitcom they run at this time is X-Files, but, by jove, at this time it is too petrifying! Satanic alien serial killers and massive, dangerous government secrets -- I'd rather watch the painfully tantalizing mattress infomercials.
"What does that have to do with anything? That's like trying to sell a bicycle because McDonald's designed it!"

Loss and Gain

Virtue runs before the muse
And defies her skill,
She is rapt, and doth refuse
To wait a painter's will.

Star-adoring, occupied,
Virtue cannot bend her,
Just to please a poet's pride,
To parade her splendor.

The bard must be with good intent
No more his, but hers,
Throw away his pen and paint,
Kneel with worshippers.

Then, perchance, a sunny ray
From the heaven of fire,
His lost tools may over-pay,
And better his desire.

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

Sep 5, 2007 11:05 AM
Subject: stomach
Watson and I are sick. He vomited on my bed, I vomited in the bathroom, then he came in to join me for a long rest against the side of the bath. Sneeze! He jumps

I shouldn't've jumped into a cold pool last evening and swam for fifteen minutes, utterly convinced that my body would adjust...
And I should've listened about showering when I came inside...
And I should simply sleep once in a while, opposed to estivating (which is like hibernating, but rather, lizards, amongst other unspeakables, do it during summer, not winter).

sneeze

Sep 6, 2007 3:32 PM
Last night was the worst sleep, or complete absence of, I've ever had. I had a ferocious ache deep in my legs and was too exhausted to move them. The top half of my skull throbbed and every inch of me was unmistakably sore. I had a menthol and eucalyptus emitter beside my bed but couldn't tell the difference because my nasal passage was hording every newspaper in history, the equivalent. I tried to read but the focus made me dizzy, I tried to sleep but my body was too vexatious, I tried to use my laptop but the heat smothered me, I tried to watch television but was irritated by the thought of anything and the film I would like to watch I have only a VHS copy, too exhausted to take the trip to the living room. I have a playstationII in my room set to watch dvds and the seldom video game. At midnight, I began the hours of lying in my dark room, pretending and desperately trying to sleep. I embraced 6am as the time to celebrate not trying to sleep by sitting on the side of my bed. I heard mum walking about in her bedroom and called out for her. Watson came in first. Mum readied a bath for me, I stayed in for five minutes, and sat on my bed to watch the news, then Arthur. Watson seemed happier since I had unplugged my sinus clearing device and decided to stay in the room with me. I drank crystal light and willed my legs to feel better, then after I cried about Luciano Pavarotti's death and watched an episode of Charmed, I passed out for 2.5 hours, tissue box, Watson, and Mutsy by my side.
Now, to complete my cycle of being utterly pathetic, my mucous is no longer watery, but yellow.

When I got my drivers' license, the first drive with Lake was to the grocery store for sugar at midnight.

en passant...
gravitas \GRAV-uh-tahs\, noun:
    High seriousness (as in a person's bearing or in the treatment of a subject).

If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it.

thriving

My stomach is heavy and my hands are tremulous. I feel as though I could weep rivers onto my chest, but I am too angry to do it. What is to be done? Only to leave, but it is inescapable. This time - I want it to leave me. My internal landscape is musing. I feel fine inside it ... unwelcome, this comes. To say that I don't want this would be a hysterical attenuation, for it is altogether insufferable.

Taken aback into gardens and mossy ponds, I stood wearisome with inquisition locked tightly in my chest. Green had deluged every surface, it built around us like the heavy walls of a haven, and bits of ivory, deep reds, and yellow obtruded eccentrically. A conversation balanced. My dress blew quickly at my legs. Crickets and robins gave every effort to provide wholesome music. It may have been the pause in my speech which granted me the look, or the look which granted me the pause. I felt exhilaration pervading my insides, seeping through my fingertips and neck. I had just seen brilliant blues and contours of the most divine beauty. I wanted suddenly to stay there always, with someone of equal intellect and imagination, irrepressible and irrefutable - no longer alone, nor with company, but in our haven of time and gardens.

Yesterday, on a mountaintop which grew thousands of Christmas trees, I sat deep within the fir amongst a circle of white flowers. A curious doe watched me as she passed. I could hear only the wind.

dentist gave me a gold-coloured owl ring with white eyes
suction with make-shift pinstripe straw
counting the mismatched sides in the light and syllables in the songs playing
aquatic theme
my tongue feels fat

we waited for the deer to cross, but he didn't show, so we couldn't wait any longer
it takes a long time, y'know, for a deer to write down on little notes that this is where he crosses
Pud Pud
track you down and kill of your fucking family
inbred rednecks
scottish man with chiseled mustache
woman guessed that I was a size 6 with my thick cardigan over a v-neck and thick sweatpants
brown leather shoes with a hole at the toe
Grace just sent me a telepathic message saying "I love you"
shaking
Nick said I have the best father in the world
Then I left him on his own and he stormed off

The United States Merchant Marine is made up of the nation's civilian-owned merchant ships and the men and women that crew them. The merchant marine transports cargo and passengers during peace time. In time of war, the merchant marine is an auxiliary to the Navy, and can be called upon to deliver troops and supplies for the military.

applause on the fruit flies, apple sauce from the insides
apples?

Then I look at you and the world's alright with me

mummies

If you will not be a lazy sod, then that makes you a dark lord worshiper, which puts you in direct correspondence with the death eaters.

Giles: Everything's terrible. Total catastrophe.
Buffy: Giles, what's wrong?
Giles: Have you seen the new library? There's nothing but computers. There's not a book to be seen.

I meant to include that, on hot days, I only walk Watson barefoot. Before I first introduced him to my home, I read in a puppy health maintenance book that the paw exterior, which is a keratinised, pigmented, hairless epidermis, is fragile, and if, when barefoot, the ground is too hot to walk on, then it is also too hot for your puppy.

In his mind, we have been great buddies for all eternity.

perfect weather

I walked outside barefoot to bring Watson on his territorial route and I noticed immediately, the weather is perfect.

8:15 in the evening

Cloudy
79°F
Feels Like
80°F
Updated Aug 15 08:00 p.m. ET

UV Index: 0 Low
Wind: From WSW at 4 mph
Humidity: 58%
Pressure: 29.95 in.
Dew Point: 63°F
Visibility: 9.0 miles

It's as though the only way to get into Heaven is by neatly parking your car in the lot and paying a membership fee every month.

venter, ventilate

Why did the raspberry chocolates taste like yogurt covered raisins?
tea whistling from the brass kettle


mystique in fury, I suppose
haven't the time insured
hours, years of preparation, dedication
no avail! I remind you - she moped about with small aches
vicinal prime! celebrate, they wailed - the baleful ale succumbs
sum becomes obscure
my senses oppose; she chose the shows, prose unsure
to compose the details and glory of a rose
the thorn, bitter and bitten beneath the veil
importance ignored as a cataract sees a cataract creeping
born on the back of a whale
for the lucid tale which tells about the pale moppet and her pearl
wrecked in her gut because she wouldn't unfurl her thought

I met an artist today. He creates jewelry as cryptic mazes of gold. They unfold, unclasp, and untwist to reveal rings, bracelets, pins, and necklaces within their larger form. He engineered each item to fit as a puzzle, only to open with clever intention. A hummingbird made of opals, gold, rubies, sapphire, and brass was placed on the glass box, he said, "Try to take this apart." I touched the corners of the wings and the circles which I knew would create a bend, then began undoing it to reveal a slender pin with an opal atop it like a staff. "I'm impressed," he said. "That usually takes most people a while to do." He fed my quiet curiosity with more goldsmith problems, then brought out clearly focused photographs of his archived work on wood and wet surfaces. His son took out his pottery and I told him what they look like. "That looks like a boot, house, landslide teapot." He laughed, "I dabbled with pottery a while ago. These are all by hand, I was horrible with the wheel."
"This looks like a whirlpool."
As I left, I aptly quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson, smiling, and they all smiled in return. "Very nice."

My first sting

My father had curiously shuffled through the bin for ten minutes before I tread up the hill to find blue fans, tarot cards, and worn woolen sweaters. Singular items, plentiful in mind. To be dipped into the treasure chest, my hand of all seeing fingers was in eusocial wasp brigade. Like all other nearly identical groups of being, they believe I am plotting a vicious conspiracy which renounces their true individual self as the upholders of mass uniformity. Naturally, I say. Blast, I say! A nest of hornets rest beneath the corner over which my arm hovered and bodied swords thrust into my skin. I screamed, ran backward whilst in search of my attacker. Another, another! Faster then. My father looked at me with both concern and bewilderment. He came toward me and I examined my arm to find three relatively large holes in the right forearm. "God dammit," I said to my father. He offered to drive me home but I insisted that we walk.
Throughout, I explained that the wretched smell in the kitchen hadn't been a dead mouse, as Mum assumed, but rather, a dead bat which had died while we were at the beach for the weekend. She hurriedly came in, handed me the disinfectant and remembered something she had to attend to outside, which kept her for the five minutes it took me to take the bat in the mouse trap outside, return, wipe down the area behind the toaster, disinfect it, and light a candle. I explained this to him because of his nose; amid his life, fights have broken it at least four times, ergo it became intolerant of the smoke put off by my mother's incense and candles. Upon returning, he would not comment on the heavy waft of apple wax and spiced plums so as to not upset my mother with the disrobed smell of rotten Chiroptera, not because of the stench itself, but because it would keep in her mind that another small animal has died in her home.

"At least it wasn't fifteen," said James.
Henry asked, "Are you in any pain now?"
I looked up at him while painting a matte print of Lake and myself and shook my head.
"That's incredible."
"I've only stepped on bees before, this is the first time they've attacked me."


At the beach, Tim read all but the last couple chapters of The Deathly Hallows. We stayed up after everyone had gone to bed and whispered our opinions and reactions to each other. I had so anticipated talking with him about the book that the idea of it knotted my stomach with excitement. Then Tim softly read to me and I fell asleep on his chest.
I am so proud of Neville. I must have cried every time he was brought into light.

The Many Humorous Colloquialisms of Mum

Whoopy Ding Dong

I gave Lake another haircut today.


"You never wanted your photograph taken. Sometimes I got a few smiles out of you, you fussed. But when Lake was there, in the photograph, all was well."

Grace's information

Activities:

Tim, reading, writing, arithmetic, martial arts, chess, taking candid photographs, dancing, leaving the country, cooking, music-making, running or sleeping, being awake, sharing, imitating sound, disappearing, barefoot chasing, illustrating anatomy, flower picking, training to be an irreligious saint.

Interests:

I like all books, itchy sweaters, gardens, character, evolution, old cities, forests, roller coasters, photographs of trees, hybrid apples, the colour "seabluegreen", genetics, mittens, scent, change, persistence, mentis similarities, architecture, strange friends, friendly strangers, wiping bubbles off my skin after baths, backgammon, coffee spirals, number associations, boxer briefs and mens' v-neck tops, childrens' museums, train of thought, juice boxes, windows, begonias, memory, language, solitude, crowds, elaborate metaphors with subtlety, absoluteness, vinegar, correction, learning to use musical instruments, memory, humour, fog, bottles, histories of any things beings, sandcastles, handwriting, big merry suppers, physics, self, wizard height, Bering Strait, atomic orbitals, horses on the beach, graffiti, significant and simple, uniform slacks, coconut, farmers, yellowing film, Lake's demanding tone, diving, compassion, nude beaches, magnificent commonplace, immunities, sensitivity, lists, memory, enthusiasm, Neville Longbottom, sour candy, walking patterns, ferocity, revolutions, resolution, revelations, alliterations, mint chocolate ice cream, Spider-man, disguised art, witch homes, brass goblets with thrones, visualizing stories as they're read aloud, hopscotch, decorating cupcakes, tea with honey, jumping in cold seas, walking by my self, collar bones, being polite, veracity, and nothing else because I also like saying extreme things that are obviously untrue.

Favorite Music:

Nina Simone, Rush, Bob Dylan, 50- 70's preferably, James Taylor, Howard Blake (with the help of Aled Jones), Shigeru Umebayashi, Nitin Sawhney, Tool, Jason Mraz, Otis Redding, Alicia Keys, Mozart, Gotan Project, Zbigniew Preisner, Of Montreal, Bach is real rock, Hootie, Amy Winehouse, Rufus Wainwright, Magnetic Fields, Percy Sledge, Ben Harper, Al Green, Damien Rice, Wilson Pickett, Jon Brion, The Cure, vocals and saxophones, headbanging and salsa, appropriate lyrics, men in harmony, violinists, my piano, slouching guitars, my 14 year old heavy metal, all 90's music I think, bagpipes or fiddles, subway musicians, bongos,

Favorite TV Shows:

Planet Earth, House, LOST, Everwood, Arthur, BBC, Curb Your Enthusiasm, South Park, late night TLC, Little Bear, Franklin, Rhupert, Babar, documentaries on the science channel, history channel, X-Files

Favorite Movies:

Beauty and the Beast, Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, Little Murders, The New World, Preparez vos mouchoirs, The Meaning of Life, The Secret Garden, Wind in the Willows, The Snowman, Billy Elliot and every other dancing movie, dubbed martial arts flicks, black and white gore, mostly anything with analytic or outrageous humour, Searching for Bobby Fischer, Aishwarya Rai, Elizabeth, no romantic comedies with the exception of Hugh Grant, and The English Patient.

Favorite Books:

Mimbulus Mimbletonia
Je t'inventerai
Des mots insensés
Que tu comprendras
Je te parlerai
De ces amants-là
Qui ont vu deux fois
Leurs coeurs s'embraser
Je te raconterai
L'histoire de ce roi
Mort de n'avoir pas
Pu te rencontrer

Favorite Quotes:

"I cannot pretend to feel impartial about colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns."

"Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?"

And greatest, "It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion, it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who, in the midst of the world, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

About Me:

I'm discrete. My mum is a Welsh Native American and my papa is an Italian Jew.

"Eternally silly, easily tipsy, occasionally chilly, ever so pretty, not a sissy, rarely prissy, deceptively gritty, surprisingly witty. A hopeless romantic, or maybe just a hopeful romantic. Temperamental, or maybe just mental. A prima ballerina on a spring afternoon. This years model. And next years, and the year after that. Equal parts guiltless schoolgirl and femme fatale. Little boy, she’s from the street. Before you start, you’re already beat."

"She was a desert rose with a boxers nose and wise white eyes that were never surprised "

"Grace, get dressed."
"Where are we going?"
"We can go return that game and pick up Pirates of Az'kaban for Lake."
Lake and I laughed.
"Do I have to get dressed?"

Watson "Chunky WeeWee" Little Bear

"There we have it - 141 photographs."
"What's this?"
"They're off the toilet. Watson brought them,"
"Jiminy Christmas."

I'm sorry, little lightning bug, that I watch you fly around the monitor and land on tissues in their box. I'm sorry that I won't capture you and free you outside in the new morning, but I've never touched a lightning bug and I don't want to try. Recently, I've heard a lot of people say that insects are mindless, but I think that right now you're watching me and wondering why I'm only watching you, and I'm sorry.
I'm too keen on typing and sensing myself become more imbued with romance and... I think I should sleep.

iko iko

Jotting down mind wanderings is priority:

 · Sucking on a frozen cube of cream soda
 · Citrus and honey salts, I soaked with the window open and two candles lit. My body feels like Autumn
 · I appreciated smells greater when I was seventeen, I touch more now
 · Last summer, I found myself sitting beside a boy I hadn't seen in over ten years. We had a romance when we were in primary school. I feared seeing him again when I was younger because he had known me when I was most vulnerable.

My vision was blurry and I looked over to see him watching me. My memory is mostly of his mouth. I told him that he has petite teeth. He told me, "I've never known anyone as great as you." I put my head on his shoulder. When standing, I saw that he was barely to my eyes - I didn't mind.

He once told another girl in our lives that he liked her more than me because she looked like Cinderella for her blonde locks, and I was merely Belle. I scoffed at him and had him love me by putting our pillow cushions beside each other when watching films in the sitting room. My mum said that as a child, it was only to I that he was kind. He had a sarcastic air with the others.
 · My return to the country house ignited a feeling of satisfying remoteness
 · An ivi is a Tahitian chestnut tree
 · My childhood friend, Chelsea, often had me promenade to entrance boys with her during summer nights in town squares, parks, or boardwalk lengths. It amused her that I would change my path in an abrupt turn once walking in a certain direction became dull. I remember looking at her strangely when she told me this. The only boy I ever found attractive on those excursions was a character that ignored girls and fought his friends at school. I am attracted to tempers.

I've read 1/3, the irreducible fraction, of The Deathly Hallows. "He's not coming with us?"
I used my nightgown to dry my eyes, walked down the steps, made two batches of butter beer, gathered Watson, and brought him back into my bedroom to accompany me.

A light knot at the base of my throat to tell
But I so enjoy the secrecy

Sugar plums soft bitten, spit out the pit then
Charter yacht for the day and a night in Lazy Jack Inn on the water

"I don't believe in ritual - I don't find truth in it. I believe that priests love Jesus, I can love Jesus through them, but if I go in a room and read the bible, I find ethics, moral code. I'm left with my appreciation of stars, trees, mathematics, three sided triangles, gravity, light, sound, life in general. I strive to understand how everything works, the fundamentals of nature, why a person feels the way they feel so I can study them, figure out what affects them to make sure I fit in. I spent my entire life with those things being my religion -- I've only known you for one year and everything else seems like a blade of grass in my life. I love you. You are my definition of love, there is nothing greater than you." Tim, sitting with me, tears welling in his eyes after our monthly argument, 22:00

The Book About Me

    Yesterday, in a used book shop, at the back of a narrow isle in the non-fiction section, I sat on a step ladder and read the introductory page of the first chapter in two Winston Churchill books, the first I hadn't recalled, a leather-bound book of European history from 1926, and reviewed the adequacy and length of the Mount Olympus summary in a large Mythology textbook. I placed the second Churchill book back on the shelf beside a book on his mother, and carried the rest to the cluttered desk in the front. Beside their aged Macintosh computer, there were books for gardening, Bronte illustrations, Winnie the Pooh, which I inspected, and caricatures. I looked through a petite book which claimed to contain the world's knowledge. The first twenty pages were blank, then a centered quote on a single page, and another twenty blank pages. I put the book down and watched the woman write down the prices of my books and deck of cards from Salem, Virginia. She was originally from Connecticut, obvious dialect. She was in her seventies. Original teeth, pin-striped shirt, keen sense of humour, knew the score of the Phillies game, which Tim told me is a Philadelphia baseball team, her colleague in the shop said that their win would tire them for the next few games.
    I paid with my bank card, placed the deck in the pocket of my white slacks, and handed the paper bag of books to Tim, additionally containing a massive history of chess for my precious. We walked outside, I questioned if I should apply for my first job, and returned. I explained that I live in Manhattan, go to school there, despite those details, I would like to work in their bookshop of two employees and erase pencil marks from old pages. The Connecticut woman smiled gloriously and laughed when I mentioned that my parents think it's time for me to gather myself a first job. It isn't necessary, and there is no better place for me to work than a musty store of books to the ceiling where I can concentrate among quite and sell books to willing persons. She sent me to speak with the woman in her sixties, I gave her identical explanation, was sent back to the woman at the desk to give my "name, number, address, and all that." I believe I have good standing with her, for I held the door open as she initially entered.
On a long drive to our French restaurant among roads with vines hanging from electrical wires, I decided that I will instead be employed at a used book shop I frequent in Manhattan.


    These are excerpts from the first ten pages of the Winston Churchill biography. I chose this book for its portrayals of our evident similarities, in the perspective of an admiring friend. It is so parallel that I feel as though it is also about my self. I read it aloud to Tim and he is equally astonished. There is no one else so close to being like me, aside from my father, he said.

    "First and foremost he was incalculable. He ran true to no form. There lurked in every thought and word the ambush of the unexpected. I felt also that the impact of life, ideas and even words upon his mind was not only vivid and immediate, but direct. Between him and them there was no shock absorber of vicarious thought or precedent gleaned either from books or other minds. His relationship with all experience was firsthand.
    "My father and his friends were mostly scholars, steeped in the classical tradition, deeply imbued with academic knowledge, erudition and experience. Their intellectual granaries held the harvests of the past. On many themes they knew most of the arguments and all the answers to them 'nothing new under the sun.' But to Winston Churchill everything under the sun was new--seen and appraised as on the first day of Creation. His approach to life was full of ardor and surprise. Even the eternal verities appeared to him to be an exciting personal discovery. And because they were so new to him he made them shine for me with a new meaning. However familiar his conclusion it had not been reached by any beaten track. His mind had found its own way everywhere.
    "Again--unlike the scholars--he was intellectually quite uninhibited and unself-conscious. He did not seem to be the least ashamed of uttering truths so simple and eternal that on another's lips they would be truisms. Nor was he afraid of using splendid language. Even as I listened, flowing and vibrating to his words, I knew that many of captious and astringent friends would label them as 'bombast,' 'rhetoric,' 'heroics.' But I also knew with certainty they would be wrong. There was nothing false, inflated, artificial with his eloquence. It was his natural idiom. His world was built and fashioned in heroic lines. He spoke its language.

    "...I noticed with deep anxiety that hardly a word had passed between them. In answer to my solicitous inquiries she told me that after an aeon of unbroken silence she made a frontal attack and said to him: 'Do tell me--what on earth are you thinking about?' He replied: 'I am thinking of a diagram' and relapsed into complete absorption. She added: 'I don't like people who make me feel as though I wasn't there.' In later years they became fast friends."

During the past seven days, I have turned five pounds of massed fat into muscle, ordered ten rolls of sushi, which I ate with brimming sauce trays of 酢, read The Scarlet Letter, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Othello, the Moor of Venice thrice, and Optics by Sir Isaac Newton. I have mastered standing position yoga, gone to Niagara Falls, stayed in the seabluegreen glass walled Sheraton overlooking the waterfalls, swam in the indoor pool with a durable balm of chlorine, purchased a sun tent for the beach, adjacently sustained the 600,000 gallons of water manifested each second by the Canadian falls,
    I had speechless reciprocation for tremendous nature.
    I looked up with the white mist blanketing my glasses
    and felt humbled, beholden to it. I imagined leading
    a boat to the brink and leaping forward off the prow.
I began a phrenic list of the types of trees I've seen in my life, survived a car crash on Independence Day

Drunken holiday enthusiasts ... He rode in unnecessary haste down an alley way, then plowed past the front of my car, causing damage to only the bumper and right headlight. The opponent spun into a pole, thence revealed a man sporting no compliance with the accurate size of his apparel. A slug, he picked up the pieces of his car in the street, and with every ounce of balance and enlightenment, said, "Man, people just gotta slow down."
Yes. Beautiful as a mayfly.

I purchased maple syrup and sugar plum preserves in Upstate New York, taken nearly 2 gigabytes of digital photographs, additional roll of film, lit roughly twenty packages of sparklers and amateur fireworks, cut my hair evenly to my collarbone due to heat, along with my sister's and mother's, received Elizabeth Arden's Mediterranean perfume from Tim, added two more of Watson's teeth to a brass container on my vanity, added two more images given by characters from Animal Crossing to a table in the video game, enjoyed my father's great joke about cookies on a grave, and I have been scheduled for New York jury duty for the first time in my life.
And I wore my deceased grandmother's wedding ring on my thumb for two days. I might have received bad luck from it.

Cranberry Raspberry Marshmellow Ice Cream

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.

I held a baby toad yesterday. This is a monumental happening.

Yellow hued photographs with humidity flash, sailor shorts, sandals, sun burnt cheeks, and wet lip smiles
pebbles in pockets

In a damask card with yellow ribbon at the crease, I wrote

Mr. & Mrs. Flynn

   Here are the photographs from Danny Boy's graduation, graduation party, and the fathers' day celebration.
   I made copies of the prints I thought you'd like to share with others in the image.
   The party was lovely enough to compensate for a rainy graduation day and the taut, looming week that preceeded it. I had a wonderful time with your family, as always.
   As always, thank you for allowing me to stay with you in your home. It is the most comfortable place I have been inside.
   I commend you for raising two pleasant, glorious sons.

Grace

I've been on the brink of bathing for about two hours, but I can't seem to push myself in the tub. Actually ... I think it's been two days of pushing

I am pillow lava
I am the ruptured gut beneath Llanddwyn Island

James' birthday party tonight, and this is what I'm making:

Three layered strawberry shortcake
Balsamic glazed filet mignon
Honey roasted red potatoes
Bloody mary mix
Carrot dressing and salad

I've walked Watson, as it his entreated custom to wake me just as the birds begin singing outside the curtained window, or the blues turn yellow. A faint whine is heard by the side of my bed that advances toward the door with time, he stares at me and waits.

I saw Spider-man 3 for the second time last evening. But, greater than the film and how greatly Peter Parker, the irascible swain in a parade of depravity, ticks me off, we entered the theatre to find Harry.... I quickly found my seat and sat mouth agape, covered in goosebumps. Oh! It was so arresting. I looked to my left once it finished to see a tear illuminated on Lake's cheek drop parallel with the tear on mine. We've never before been so excited to see a film.

I read this in a gourmet cooking magazine today:

Dodecenal, a compound found in fresh Cilantro leaves, has been found to be twice as effective in fighting salmonella as the antibiotic most commonly prescribed by doctors worldwide.

We returned from the grocery store at 23:00 with breakfast muffins, sourdough pretzels, and chocolate. There is a frog living in the grass, I thought, and sat with qualm. I felt my feet lifting from the floor of the vehicle just as I do when dancing and avoiding frogs in the grass. A spry caper faintly touching the ground.
    "He looks like my frog Rupert," said Lake.
I was silent.
    "Do you know who I'm talking about?"
    "Your frog from the story,"
    "No, my pet frog. I've had a lot of frogs in my lifetime and they've all been named Rupert."


The prior morning I laid my head on Tim's chest and listened to a calm sleep. The alarm in his mobile phone had just gone off - he silenced it. I waited to say good morning and traced the contours of his arm like a path. Watson also wanted to follow; he walked up to us from the foot of the bed, which is where he chooses to sleep only when Tim is here.

Thunder rolls over our French mansard roof.

He rested his head on Tim’s neck and woke him up. Tim put his arms around me, inclined his head toward Watson, and said, “My favourites.” Slow kiss on my forehead. I feel safe regarding our being together for the entirety of our long lives. I want only him. I'm happy with his mathematics and sensitivity.

Lake and I went to see Shrek 3 at the drive-in a few days ago.

I love when I feel convivial. My cheeks feel stained with roses, and warmth comes in from my waist when I smile at people passing me. There are no dark circles under my eyes or distracting brainstorms. I am the first to raise my hand when greeting; I love to share stories, go on about anything you like, with necessary exclusions, and make merry. I don't hold open doors without looking at the crossing person, I hum when making breakfast, opposed to a stare and closed mouth. I say more than a few sentences of substantial reserve and candor. I feel carefree, which is so otherworldly to me.

A Scottish professor of sociology called me a "polymath" today. This word is defined; person of great or varied learning.

my life when I'm with my self

Beetles, slugs, spiders with white abdomens, pharaoh ants, wasps, pholcus phalangioides, bumble bees, and centipedes yet to reach 100. "Lake, fetch me the salt!" Salt, she questioned. Do you want to watch the slugs wither with me? "Err, no." I think she didn't hear the question. Slugs scarcely the size of my fingernail, which are hardly feminine or acrylic, since I've had to cut them to avoid crescent impressions in my palms, and the latter, because I'm not a neurotic buffoon. We do animalistic things for attention. Today, a man with a Yankee tattoo on his right bicep swelled his chest and physically gloated like a peacock. His sister and father were in the wine shop while I waited for my mum to get lettuce and chicken. She had said to me before going in, "You should shave your armpits before wearing muscle man shirts." A muscle man shirt is a positive variation of the name "wife beater", which Tim said, "Most men that wear them and call them 'wife beaters' probably will go on to beat their wives, so it's an appropriate name." The name pharaoh ant is felicitous, as well. Yellow ants, like the desert, of uncertain origins, like the worker men of the pyramids, tramping around in colossal amounts doing chores without end for gods without voices, under men with heavy feet. The weeds in the garden by the kitchen are racking, and I'm clearing it so I can fill it with German irises for my father. He wants to paint them. This means I must kill the insects.

picnic

Red russian, german, hebrew on the canvas bag that hangs on the stained glass door. The woman from Georgia said that you have to weld the metals to the frame with a soldering iron. Her art had too many triangles for my liking, but her hands looked like an asiatic map, painted with a sumi and suzuri.
I picked up a free cardboard box full of 1993 copy written medical encyclopedias today. A craftsman from the lawn service commented on how heavy they were when I requested that he carry it inside to the library.

He had already exclaimed about the a-shirt I wore; McCain Lawn Care, which had been given to me by the man that does the gardening and tedious landscaping, 29 year old Brian. I went into the back of his pick-up truck and asked for it while James showed his collaborative studio in the barn. It has appealing dirt and grass stains, and wide holes where sleeves once were. "Yeah sure, it's not mine. I used to work for them, before I started working here." Brian was raised by his step-mother after his biological father left them before he reached puberty. Three of his siblings were born in the month of May, accompanying his birth day, the 22nd. He told me that he remembers me sleeping beside the pool last summer, then showed me the brimful insects that are feasting on the dead birch tree.

  "Hey mom, is this the daughter? The one that lives in New York?" he asked when delivering the invoice. "In college? What are you gonna do after?"
  "English professor,"
  "Whoa-hoh ... that's good."
  "That's why I read so much. Er, I'll teach English because I read so much."
  "You're tellin' me!"
  "Have you met my mum's dog? The small one that bites ankles?"
  "I've seen him, yeah. The black one?"
  "He's dead. He died a couple days ago. That's what my mother just attempted telling you,"
  "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. My dog died a few weeks ago. He was hit by a train and had his head cut off."

Two days ago, a minute conversation nearby charmed me, so I imagined writing it down, which normally embeds it in my memory. I can't think of it now. I have to teach myself not to be so distracted at times. I may have been dreaming. Lately, my dreams conspire to have me keep things. I often wake up wanting to write down quotations from the dream, then I fall asleep and the mnemonic ebbs.

I'm ticked off and heavy-hearted; I just went to turn on my laptop and begin uploading the 600 photographs taken this weekend, as well as, roughly, two hundred from the past month which complimented the recent accumulation with fellow subjects and occasion. These have yet to be backed onto an external hard drive, which I do every two months for my well-being. I received a message telling me there was an error that caused Windows to shut down. The message asked me to choose between safe mode, safe mode with command prompt, last known working configuration, and start windows normally. Start windows normally then. It restarted and brought me directly back to the same caviling screen, black with white text, deriding me with a 30 second count-down and blinking text cursor. After ten tries, I went to call customer services, but my serial has worn from the sticker and all of my notebook materials are in the country house. My second and pis aller, I called Tim four times, then our friend John, as he was following him back to his house for the night and day to enjoy the amenities of home, including the Halo 3 demo. By then I was in tears over the idea of losing my files. Tim assured me that he'll save the files when he comes tomorrow, but I'm still ticked off and heavy-hearted.

Long live the queen

Sweet Goddess
Born of a blinding light and a changing wind,
Now, don't be modest, you know who you are and where you've been.
Jack the Cowboy went up north
He's buried in your past.
The Lone Wolf went out drinking
That was over pretty fast.
Sweet Goddess
Your perfect stranger's comin' in at last.

Oh my gosh, so vastly in love with Tim
I've been awake for an hour - it may be time to get dressed

Coy

Mylhasapoo.com gallery
No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversations as a dog does. Not as often, rather.
Unlike other dogs, my dog doesn't circle his napping area before setting down to sleep, he plops down when exhaustion strikes as though he has no choice but to do so. I use the word 'plop', because there's no other way to describe the sound.
This is how our nighttime discussions usually go; "Wat-so, are you adequately awake to join me on a walk?" I put him on the floor as I get up from wherever I'm lounging. Plop! Then I grab a book, he watches me, and if I pass into another room, he follows and plops near me. "Good boy."

Drink from this heart now, for all this loving it contains. When you look for it again, it will be dancing in the wind.

I will not read the final Harry Potter book

"I am. What crazy reason do you have for this one? I'm sure you'll make it sound completely rational and valid, but as much as I love you, you won't stop me reading it. Then again, I'm not a Harry Potter fanatic so don't really care whether I do or don't read it..."

"I don't care for Harry. Neville holds my heart, and I don't want to know how she concludes the story,"

For once, elucidate on something necessary and satisfy the populace!

"I'm torn between apathy for her choice, and concern for her sequitur. If I am to read the final book and Neville isn't expounded with every bit of diction and cadence allotted to her imagination, her adjudication would sentence me to excruciating benightedness! To fill me with hope in book 5, when his character becomes distinct, then mention him three measley times in the 6th... it was like trying to nap in a bivouac.
"Aside from this; the feelings inferred from reading the books are fond to me, I enjoy recalling the days and nights I spent reading them. I spent a day in my mother's bed reading Prisoner of Azkaban. Her long windows were open and Lake was outside with James. I ate an entire bag of strawberry licorice.
"The 6th book disillusioned me, I no longer feel that she could consummate the series. Not reading it will my avoidance of disappointment and denouement; I want the possibility of firstly reading it to stay open, for my satisfaction."

a moment quiet enough, crickets would've been amply suitable, so I picked up straw in my mind and chewed on it, then I rocked back and forth on the white rocking chair

my phrenic haikus of today

three parts opposed one
equinox
remember these things

impassive, withdrawn
go on, sis
almost done the day

sweet air exudates
aria
cherry Akebono

father sleeping, still
insufflate
birds lounging

rewards for mother
lost family
macabre carcass

abdul, forget the sheep
the u.s.
avenge as jihad

profited campaign
business gone
sole practitioners

Lecturing a friend

"weapons cocealed here, little sisters on da pill here, cant pay our bills here but we like ta chill here COMIN FROM WHERE IM FROM"
Male, 18 years old

Your 'headline', Eddy, is superfluous and boring. Do you know what a catharsis is? A sudden emotional breakdown or climax that constitutes overwhelming feelings of great pity, sorrow, laughter or any extreme change in emotion that results in the renewal, restoration and revitalization for living. Your catharsis, this extreme change, is a play. I may have been completely oblivious to how your life was going, but I hadn't seen any bit of sorrow in your life - no need for weapons and vain armor. It doesn't normally upset me when I see people going through character transformation, but you were such a charming, authentic person, and now you're portraying yourself as a callous thug. I recently started gardening for my mum, planting vegetables and flowers around the house, and during this process, I learned that a thug is a gardening term meaning an over-vigorous plant that spreads excessively. This is what unmoved teenage boys do as a favourite past-time - become thugs and ruin gardens. This is understandable, a defensive way of life, for someone that needs to defend themselves against their home area or affiliations, but you are sweet and lovely enough to far withstand anything without being crude, and certainly without being like every other teenage boy with hopes and dreams of being a thug. This is for Dante, as well, and you two can complain about getting a message like this as much as you like, and go on about how I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but I care about both of you too much to see either of you stop being who, and how, you were for the majority of your lives. Eddy, your favourite books are listed as Harry Potter and you emphasize taking care of the planet, I can't think of anything sweeter. None of this is intended to insult you, so I hope you don't take this offensively. If you do, then I'm sorry but I mean everything I've written.
I'm sure your headline would upset Lina, too.
One more thing to bother you about, if he is actually your younger cousin, that means he's still a child, just like you and me, and tell him that he just looks an ass giving the middle finger in the photograph you have up.
Have a great night.

The Scooby to your Shaggy,
Grace

moved to the desert and came out dry

10 RANDOM THINGS ABOUT ME

1. I like to cook French cuisine, eat Japanese cuisine, and smell Italian cuisine
2. I have a rotation of apogeal moods
3. I buy summer dresses in every season
4. I like artificial grape flavouring
5. I do nothing in moderation
6. I can recite most poems I've ever read, and preferred paragraphs of essays and novels
7. I don't eat peanut butter, tuna, pork, soy, or shrimp, and I have a story for the day I stopped each
8. We've decorated our Christmas tree to the sounds of Hanson's Snowed In CD since I was in grade 4
9. I prefer walks, films, travel, music, and learning with only my self, with the exception of Tim's company
10. I've been doing ballet since I was able to walk

9 WAYS TO WIN MY HEART
1. Don't use noticeable hair products
2. Maintain yourself in all environments
3. Honesty
4. Being honorable and kind-hearted
5. Non-competitive intellect
6. Funny
7. Don't be a cheeky bastard that loves to compare self-proclaimed greatness with ostensible opponents, it's certain you'll be unjust
8. Enjoy and willingly venture for minute, beautiful things
9. Love information and Tim

8 THINGS I CARRY/WEAR EVERYDAY
1. My brown boots
2. Camera
3. Phone
4. Hat
5. Bra without wires or padding
6. Pen
7. Keys
8. Book

7 THINGS THAT ANNOY ME
1. Slow chewing
2. observable insecurities
3. you know you know you know you know
4. Pop culture, people fawning and asking me about celebrities and their lives, tabloids
5. Sarcasm
6. Vulgarity
7. The irrelevant questions of philosophy

6 PLACES I'VE VISITED
1. New Zealand
2. Australia
3. Asia
4. Europe
5. Egypt
6. South Africa

5 THINGS I WANT TO DO BEFORE I DIE
1. Have five children
2. Win a nobel prize
3. Teach
4. Become president or another strong political figure, and avoid being assassinated by a redneck
5. Live in a boathouse with Tim

4 THINGS I'M AFRAID OF
1. Frogs
2. Something horrid happening to Lake
3. Gremlins
4. Something horrid happening to Tim

3 THINGS I DO EVERYDAY
1. Piss
2. Read
3. Talk with Tim

2 THINGS I'M TRYING NOT TO DO NOW
1. Have a cup of tea to go see the verdict of Watson's health
2. Fall asleep

1 PERSON I WANT TO SEE NOW
1. Tim of course

Guess who's home...

I have to give him fatty prescription foods, one pill twice a day, and a syringe during night hours for ten days. He's been following me while home all day, and he attempted getting his groove on with my foot. Also, he's found an area of my bedroom he likes: pile of commonly worn shoes beneath the cushioned bench at the nadir of my bed, so I put a single slipper in his canine bassinet.

Watson

Written on 3/13/07: Tim and I got a puppy last week, and after four days of snuggling for five minute periods in bed between naps, training him to come "viens", and having him sleep on my legs, Watson's inappetence caught up to him with symptoms of lethargy and vomiting. He's on antibiotics, anti-parasitics and nutrient fluids now, in the emergency animal hospital for the third night. Tim and I have been picking him up from the hospital every morning between 6 and 6:30, then bringing him to the clinic an hour later, and back to the hospital at 7:30 each evening. Missed classes on Monday, because Tim came back Sunday night, after having left only five hours prior, when I called crying about our little puppy vomiting masses of bile on the examination room floor. Oh gosh, it was horrid and we're both so worried. Last night the Bowdoin College, UPenn Graduate veterinarian called at 11 and told us that Watson may not live to the morning, but if he does, then it's likely that he'll overcome his undiagnosed illness. Crying in each other's necks, poor little fella must've felt so qualmish. When driving him to the hospital this evening, he tried eating my glasses, attentively watched Tim perorate, rested with his face at the bottom of my neck, and sniffed at my tongue rolling sound. The doctors said he seems a great deal healthier, but I'm not bringing him home until he's as healthy as he can be for now.

Addendum: He is coming home tomorrow!

Opera house

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they
discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be
less familiar than the rest.

I am satisfied--I see, dance, laugh, sing;
As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night,
and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread,
Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the house with
their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?

Love, in a slumber beside me in my peach blanket. Orange pineapple juice on the nightstand beside him. He has me sleep on the inside so I can't get up all hours of the night. We have the flu.
Summer seen, describe
Soon enough, when I have the time
Secret beach I gathered from a memory with my mother, as a young girl she brought me there when it was lawfully nude. A convoluted dirt path enclosed with Purpleleaf Sand Cherry trees, then you reach an opening of Arkose sand that offers two avenues of choice within the tall grasses. Wide enough only for one person at a time, allusive Peter Pan, we watched for snakes, pushed grass out of our faces - glorious secret. There was a single sailboat in the water above sting rays and other assorted Elasmobranchii. We laid down our blanket, undressed, and rested beside each other. Quiet. It was early August, just after lunch on a Sunday. I told him I love him, and we fell asleep.