I am much too small in this world, yet not small enough to be to you just object and thing, dark and smart.

sometimes a place is not what you remembered
a dark mass of lost streets
empty subway platforms
full of stangers
still seaching for
my lost
shaker of salt.

is it wrong to steal a cat?

"when we put together three things...

...it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character."

if you put together these three things:

Red Bull
the spontaneous appearance of a term paper ghost-writer
ridding Melaina's body of the reservoir of snot it is harbouring

you would get one joyful girl.

at the moment John Stuart Mill is the polar star of headaches.

help.

I mean, come on Francesca. You didn't think that you could just strut around in your little towel and turn Cole's head, did you?

I stopped going to high school midway through my junior year. There were a lot of reasons for this: fucked up serotonin levels, insecurity, stat/trig. My favorite reason, however, is Sunset Beach.

Yes, I stopped going to high school for a daytime soap.

I remembered all this, just now, lying sick (ok, propped up with pillows sick) in bed, glancing at a muted infomercial (juicers! I love juicers!).

Being sick isn’t what it used to be.

Sick days used to entail a cool, discerning parental hand across the forehead and permission to pull the blankets up snug and roll over blissfully. The best sick days were the ones when my mom would come home from work with magazines, crosswords and Betty and Veronica. She brought me my first issue of Seventeen magazine when I was eleven. Milla Jovovich was on the cover. This was before feminist theory ruined glossy fashion publications for me. Back then, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen (save perhaps Mia Sara in Legend).

I made the mistake of staying home sick the day Sunset Beach premiered. A show I hadn’t missed the first twenty years of! Sweet! Pre-Tivo, I began to weigh my options. Clive Robertson or math? I’m a sucker for British accents. Good thing I feign illness well. Move over Ferris Bueller.

I once rang up Dax Griffin while working retail in Los Angeles. I had the urge to hit the guy for cheating on Meg, but thought better of it. Instead, I silently cursed him for ruining my education.

what day is this?

I live a very solitary life. This is nothing new. With the exception of, perhaps, Chaya, Professor Klotz, and my therapist, Linda (whom I see bimonthly), I don’t interact with anybody on a regular basis.

I keep in touch with people online. I know most of my local Starbucks employees. I am even familiar with the baristas over at Sip & Kranz (my alternate coffee run. They serve Stumptown Coffee, which is really so much better).

I am social, but it is certainly the exception.

I finished Into the Forest by Jean Hegland last week. It deals with a post-apocalyptic world where technology has failed, oil is gone and the country has gone to hell. The characters weigh what is actually relevant when the modern world collapses – they realize how trivial the days of the week are. It made me think about how I measure time, how I measure my life.

I measure my days in empty coffee cups and empty cans of Red Bull. If the bagels are gone, a week has passed. If the pile of clothes on the floor by my closet is getting out of hand, that means it’s laundry day - a week-and-a-half. If my box of Emergen-C is empty, thirty-six days. If there’s a pile of books on my window sill that need to be shelved, the quarter is almost over. If there’s a packet of graduation info in my mailbox, all those years I thought I wouldn’t get through have, in fact, passed.

The day is only an interruption of my night. Maybe this is why people only seem to call me after 12:30am.

Somebody asked me today if anything exciting had happened in my week and I thought, yes. I ordered something online with the quickest (free) UPS ground delivery I have ever encountered. I arrived home this afternoon with a perfect square little box at my door and I was simply delighted. Even though I was sopping wet with rain.

As my graying, plump college writing professor used to say, it would behoove you to buy an umbrella.