airplants are cool, but solitude is better.

I hugged my panda bear extra-tight watching this. Seriously watch it, it's great:

I was talking on the phone with my parents tonight when the doorbell rang. I wasn't expecting anyone and asked my parents what to do - I'm prone to paranoia about that sort of thing and abject fear started coursing through my body... heart rate quickening, palms sweating, that awful sense of dread that sets in right at the nape of my neck and clutches ferociously - They told me not to answer it and I didn't. A few moments later, a flashlight shines through the windows outside my room, looking out into the gated backyard.

Hang up and call 911, my parents tell me, and I do. I don't know how dispatchers remain so calm; I sort of fluctuated between "Oh my god, I'm going to die" and chatting with him about school and my roommates and that sort of thing. Two cars were on the way, he said, with two officers each. I had seen some kind of utility truck in front of the house a while earlier, I mentioned a little later, but I didn't understand why they'd be there that late at night.

What seemed like an eternity later, the officers arrived - all four of them - and told me that the utilities folks were in the adjacent backyard doing some work. I'm dressed in short sleep shorts and a worn, transparent tee shirt. We walked through the backyard and the officers told the FPL workers that there had been some complaints. They were grumpy. We're fixing the power, they said. We walked back into the house and just then, the power goes out.

I can't stay here without any lights on, I said. I have a candle here, but no lighter. No matches. I don't smoke. It's like Survivor, one of them said. "Light flint with a rock, that shit is hotter than the sun." I was watching Man vs. Beast the other night, another one mentioned. We tried to use the cigarette lighter in my car, but to no avail. Don't any of you smoke?, I ask. That'll kill you, one replies. You've got enough liquor here to have a good old time, another officer assures me after assessing the collection stored in our hutch.

I ask if I can go in with one of the officers and his flashlight to collect a few things, maybe leave the house until the lights come on. They all kind of pat one on the back and say he'll take care of me. He follows me in, I grab a jacket to cover up and my bag. Let us know if we can do anything else for you, he says. Alright, thanks, good night. Off to CVS, my new favorite store, and I feel a little shady as, still shaking, I fumble for ninety-one cents change to pay for a lighter, nothing else for me tonight, thank you.

I'm still reeling from a horrible dream Friday night in which I was forced to move back on campus and live with three of the girls from the gossip girl series. They were so mean and cool, but I was too shy to talk to them so I couldn't party with the cool kids and I seemed as awkward as ever. What a stupid dream.

I'm thinking about my birthday cake lately, because thinking about bars in Sarasota is too depressing. My dilemma is this: Part of me wants a chocolate-ginger cake, but a. I don't really want a chocolate cake on my birthday, and b. I can't think of a suitable frosting. My other option is earl grey cake which seems nice because I love earl grey, but I'm worried it will flop, plus I don't know what to frost it with. Just vanilla "butter""cream?" I just don't know.

holy crap kanda is for sale on ebay. so depressing. i am ready to bid. i loooooooove pandas.

I didn't realize that devoted pie-lovers hate cake. I love finding weird people's websites.


mmm... pie.

i've never seen a survey thing about food, and i'm currently mid-baking, so i think i'm gonna do it...

( ... )

crucifix - little man fell off."

holy guacamole, today i saw stephen king at barnes and noble! he was wearing a "save the cheerleader, save the world" shirt. how cute is it that he's into heroes?

*

i am kind of tired of livejournal, but i think i'd someitmes like to write about some of the books i read. right now, i'm working on rosa lee: a mother and her family in urban america. i've always known people live differently than i do, but it's interesting to get an in-depth look at a quite different way of life. so i'd recommend it. plus, i learned what a "billie" is and now some of my favorite rap songs make a lot more sense.

informal poll,

icing on muffins. okay or not?
by okay, i mean delicious. hmmm.

Yesterday was the first time I heard Pangea described as the Americas "snuggled up" to Europe and Africa.





Cute.

gecko feet






maybe biology won't be so bad.

I just printed out my paper that's due in a few minutes, but I forgot to change the title from "COOL TITLE" to an actual cool title. Bummer.

usually i put some sbdfbsdskjn-type deal next to the things i need to change so that it shows up in spellcheck, but i guess i forgot. i can't believe cool really is a word.

woah last night i dreamed that there was a baby bear, so tiny that he looked like a baby cat, but he was a bear. everyone wanted to pet him but he ran up to me and i pet him. he bit me but the whole thing was too cute to care. there was another baby animal there with him, but i don't remember what. probably a wolf.

the other day on my way to play with snooty, the manatee, i saw the bridge going over the Manatee River and I thought about a car going over the edge. (Not in a morbid way really.) Anyway, I was maybe sixteen or seventeen when my mom's friend Joellen came to visit from Charleston. She was talking about some safety reminders she had received in an e-mail forward, and said that if our car was ever to go into water, we should wait for a few moments before opening the window and swimming out. It had never really occured to me to do that. My plan, if my car were to become submerged in water, was to hang out in the car, my own private underwater hideout. I thought I could live in there and I kind of thought it would be great. I guess that's stupid, but who would know a car is not watertight?

I'm thinking lately about decision-making and thought processes and all of those things. I feel pretty good, so it's nice to feel a little moony and sad without feeling badly. I've been making myself laugh a lot, and I don't really feel too weird about it. I don't know if you're supposed to say that much. I know more than I let on. I hate candy. I'm not really into screamo. I don't think dolphins are that great. I wish I could have a half-sleeve. I only want cereal sometimes.

There we go.

Yesterday I noticed that the sign outside of Sarasota High School says:

REMEMBER
FREEDOM IS NOT FREE

That made me feel so sad. So I'm not going to say that you should vote because if you don't want to, you shouldn't. But personally, I think it's important.

My earliest memory of voting was the presidential election of 92. My whole family went to Charles Towne Landing, to the weird auditorium type room. The man in line in front of us had sandals and these long toenails that were yellow and kind of curly.
We had been to that same place a few years earlier to see my brother's mixed-media artwork The Give Machine on display in a county-wide art contest. The Give Machine isn't one of those things that I think about every day, but it is a neat one. Basically it's a giant vending machine. Everything costs twenty-five cents and you put in your money and you get anything you want. There are two portals to retrieve your wish, one small and one large. In the painting, a crazy-haired boy (my brother, I think) has just gotten a car, which is flying out of the giant portal. There is a bird just a few feet above the Give Machine and he kind of looks as though he's been electrocuted. There are clouds and lightning and my brother's name is scrawled in pencil up there in the sky. It's kind of dramatic and crazy, but I love it. Maybe one day I can put it on my wall.
The other thing I'm thinking about today is my social security number. It's so weird that we all just memorize these nine digit strings of information and that it's written, right above my eleven-year old signature in a blue inky pen (with smudge) on a card that, for me at least, is perpetually lost. And I wonder when I became aware that I had a social security number. I didn't ever use it until I was sixteen and applied for my first job. And I wonder where it's recorded and if there's anyone whose sole job is to think about my social security number (and yours) all day. Probably not.
What I imagine when I think of social security numbers, perhaps since I was born in the eighties, is a small room with a computer running DOS-- all black screen and bright green, all-caps font-- and printing out a constant stream of new social security numbers on that weird paper that is connected sheet by sheet with a perforated seam, and has the weird punctured strips on the end that you can peel off to make foldy-caterpillar people.

my head hit the steering wheel. for the first time, in the stratus anyway. i think i'm going to vomit.

Today an interesting t.v. theory came to me:

It's looking like Christopher and Lorelai are going to Paris sometime this season. So did Carrie in season six of Sex and the City. While Gilmore Girls is now in season seven, I can't help but wonder if Paris is where great t.v. shows go to die. How depressing. I don't know where this phrase originated, but I really hope that Gilmore Girls hasn't "jumped the shark." If they're going to go there to break up just like Carrie and Mikhail Barishnakov I am going to be pretty annoyed. (Though of course I do want Christopher and Lorelai to break up... TEAM LUKE.)

The thing I don't like about PBS is I am watching this special on giant pandas and then it starts into this twenty minute commercial for some weird Irish singer. And I waited.

"'In your old lives you had nothing to live for. Now you do. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Go clear the land for a new culture-bring your axes, scythes, and guns. I know you have the necessary skills-explosives, medicine, engineering, media knowledge, and the ability to camouflage yourselves. If you're not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world-if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order-then you're wasting your day.'" --Douglas Coupland

I don't really understand how men get turned into "state prisoners," formless entities deprived of base rights. I think crime is weird, and I don't know why it happens, but maybe it's just a mix up of standards and instincts. Maybe things were supposed to be the other way around. I don't know if I'm necessarily saying retribution for one's actions is wrong, but I think we need to evaluate what we've created.

What can you take away from people, and for what reasons?