redundancy.

i have this new pet peeve. 
it is making up for lost time by, despite it's newness, being very, very strong.

it's redundancy.

it's a specific type, though. it's new unnecessary addition of 'very,' as an intensifier, to strong adjectives.

examples:
-very critical
-very devastated
-very terrified
-very furious

i listen to a GREAT DEAL of npr, and at least once a week someone attempts to express their feelings, and says something like that. it's akin to whipping out an 'impressive' word at the wrong time.

devastated is pretty intense by itself, pally. it doesn't need anything else. upset? sure, amp that up a notch to 'very upset.' sad? same thing. let'e make it 'very sad' so we can get an idea about how intense your feelings are.. but 'very terrified?' too much. now you sound like a middle school student.

that's all. just saying. it's been bugging me.

oh, i had a really lame day at work today. it ended up okay, but i was almost in tears by noon. not good. i was very anguished. har-dee-har.

eggplant.

i think eggplant is totally disgusting. well, as a food. i enjoy aubergine as a color. also as a word.

however, i have recently discovered that i really enjoy baba ganoush. (is that how one spells is?) about once a week i get the mediterranean combo plate at truly mediterrranean, on 16th, and it is like a massive orgy of deliciousness. sososo good. and way too big. way too much food.

anyway, i have avoided the ganoush, because i know i really detest eggplant, so i probably won't like it, but i finally tried it and it is fucking delicious. it has a gently smokey flavor. the texture still gets little bit snotty for me, but i dip stuff in it (falafal ball? pita? dolma? yesyesyes!) and it is just fine.

i think that this illustrates one of my favorite traits about myself, which i suppose could also be seen as a character flaw, but *i* think it's good.

i come from a VERY opinionated people. my mom and dad are very strong people, and i am a strong person, and we harbor strong feelings about things. so, when i opine, i am a very STRONG opiner. as i've gotten older i have grown to be a little bit embarassing about my rants, and see how obnoxious they can be, but until about 3 years ago i was unaware what a loud-mouth i was. 

so, i will, from time to time, loudly pontificate and expound on something or other. i am a very persuasive speaker, and i am funny.

but i am also quick to admit that i am wrong. or, to be open to grey areas and areas of contradiction. so, i may have a really strong negative reaction to a person, and feel like they're human bags of shit, and that they smell, and that they dress like tramps, or act like tramps, or are seemingly without any redeeming qualities. 

but, if time passes and it appears that my earlier assessment of that person was wrong, i will not hold on to my negative opinion,just to be right. i will let myself like them. i will let go of my previous negative opinion.

so, eggplant, i was wrong to say you were without redeeeming qualities. in baba ganoush, you are a delight. and the color of your outer skin is very lovely. you are still the texture and flavor of snot when not in baba ganoush, but i was wrong to be so close minded.

another example: mayo. hate you, mayo. the idea of mayo is gross. seeing it blobbing out the side of a sandwich is revolting. and yet...
if the aioli (which is basically mayo) is mixed with something tasty, like horseradish, you are very delicious. or, on a turkey sandwich with cranberry sauce, you add a nice little creaminess. so, while i don't feel like anything i said on the 'mayo haters' tribe discussion board was wrong, and i stand by that feeling, i admit i will voluntarily add you. 

also, eggs. i don't trust you, eggs. you hurt me. you make me feel ill 4 out of 5 times. but that 5th time, when you sit easily in my stomach, you're pretty much perfect. soft-boiled you're nasty; deviled, hard-boiled, fried, all these ways are repellent. but scrambled, and used to hold together various elements of deliciousness (bacon, cheeses, broccoli, whatevs) you are just the thing. 

other times when i was wrong:
-christina aguilera - i was not wrong when i rejected you for the whole 'dirrrrrty' thing. that was a really lame, ugly, whorish time for you. i have always said your voice is very strong. and now you have pulled yourself together, and i am happy to root for you and your seemingly normal marriage to that jewish guy. 

-chocolat (the movie) - i refused to see you because you looked cheesy and i don't really enjoy juliette binoche (but i think that is only because i read a really annoying interview with her in vogue once), but you were delightful and i would gladly watch you weekly.

-la - i admit there is non-suck to be found, i just didn't find much of it. some tasty-ass food and 2 or three people i love. 

this could be a fault, in that i am changeable, but i think it's good. if i'm wrong, i'm wrong. and i am not going to pretend to like someone or something when i don't. i won't go to a party at someone's house if i don't like them, even if everyone i know is going. 

i know i haven't been talking about cancer much lately. i haven't been thinking about it a lot, either. i mean, i am, i can't help it, but i have been thinking about other things.

don't worry. i am sure there's more to talk about,

that is what i'm talking about!

i think that pot, in general, is totally fine.
i used to be a HUGE fan, but i enjoy it less and less as i get older. 
i still think back wistfully about my doobage days, and, from what i can remember of them, they were largely positive. lots of fun times.

but there's something about people who are Pot People that just gives pot a bad name. like, if you like to do bonghits and watch family guy and listen to sabbath, that's fine. but there's another level, where you are in your own little doobie-world, and your constant high acts as a weird wall between you and reality.

to extremes, you become the people that vice pointed out. brr. but to a lesser degree, you still end up retarded, and by retarded i mean slowed. it's like the rest of the world is operating at normal speed and you're just a few seconds behind, all the time. always a lag.

mom's boyfriend, 'jer-bear'/leg man, is never NOT high. ever. what the fuck? so, combine 40 years of perpetual stoney baloney-ness with hearing problems, add in a dash of really weirdness that can't be accounted for by the other two, and you have a very, very strange man. who LOVES pot. loves it. and he uses pot like other people use antidepressants or something. because reality, and being in his brain, is just too much without something there to help.

it's true, pot itself isn't addictive, but there seems to be something about the way it makes people feel, or that comforting level of buffer that it allows smokers, that really does seem like an addiction. try hanging out with a perma-stoner who is almost out of weed, and experience the constantly escalating level of intensity over procuring more, and you'll see. it doesn't feel much different from any kind of drug addict freaking out for their drug of choice. same as smokers, same as people who are hooked on coffee, and, though my personal experience with people trying to buy harder drugs is limited (because i am a goody-goody who swallowed the whole d.a.r.e. thing), i imagine there is a similar level of craziness and laser-focus.

so maybe it's not pot's fault, but whatever part of the brain that pot soothes sure does seem to really, really, really want more.

whoa, dude.

the scene: kira, the protagonist, in her trusty car, alethea, drives home from work. she is in the castro. she is attempting to cross market st, which has 4 lanes of traffic at that point.

the action: the time to take advantage of the green light for crossing market is almost gone. the cars ahead of kira are sitting in the middle of market st like assholes. the light is so almost-yellow that it's barely even green anymore.

enter the antagonist...kira chooses to wait out the light, so as not to be stuck on market, with drivers honking at her. she is a prudent, careful driver. suddenly, behind her, she hears a horn honking. not just a little beep-beep! but a HOOOOOOONK! HOOOOOOOOOONK! followed by "COME ON WHAT ARE YOU DOING YOU STUPID FUCKING BITCH DRIVE!!!!!!!!!" 

a quick glance in her rearview mirror reveals the following: muscular gay man. face purple with rage (and meth?) mohawk. silver mirrored aviators. a puffy camo vest with a furry collar/hood. him screaming to the tendons in his neck stand out, and spittle flecks the windshield.

'whoa, dude. what the fuck?' she thinks to herself in confusion. some pedestrians who are crossing the street in front of kira (because the light is red now) look at the insane person with fear, look at kira, and share a rueful shrug.

the incredible meth fag hulk switches his car into reverse and reverses, at 50 mph, down the hill, to the end of the block, where he reverses into the intersection and turns around to take the next street over. 

kira is startled and bemused. she is chuckling to herself, and still shaking her head ruefully when she hears the sound of a speeding car coming from her left. sure enough, it is the meth hulk. he speeds past her, on market st, with one hand on the horn and one arm extended to display a very insistent middle finger to kira as he speeds past. 


um...what? whoa, ragey-ragerton. whoa there.

now we see why there are so many ads in the bus shelters in the castro about meth use. because people like that guy are being super-heroes of insane rage all over the place.

a letter.

here are some versions i am toying with...


++++++++++++++++++++++++

hello, neighbor!

today is the second day this week that your raised voice was the first sound i heard.

this is not a pleasant way to wake up.

please remember that other people live near you and would perhaps like to enjoy their day off by sleeping in past 7:00am.

thanks.


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

dear woman-with-the-very-high-shriek,

stop screaming so loud, so early.

perhaps there is a reason why your dog doesn't come to you when you make that terrible noise. 

personally, i find myself drawn to you by the sound, but only so i can shout at you to please be quiet because it is very, very, very early.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

dear screaming crazy person next door,

shut your fucking trap.

i don't give a shit if you're running late and your kid and dog aren't moving fast enough. that shouldn't be my problem.

if you have to raise your voice so often, you're doing something wrong.

the vast majority of people are able to get things done on a daily and weekly basis without screaming at the top of their lungs, so you might want to reevaluate your tactics. they certainly make *me* want to either hurt you or run until you are out of voice range, so i can imagine the effects on your poor kid and dog. clearly they hate you and don't respect you as an authority figure, and it's not a mystery why, since you lose your shit at the slightest provocation. that doesn't inspire confidence or respect. it does inspire loathing. me and your kid and dog are holding anti-you meetings in the afternoons, to discuss our feelings about you, and none of those feelings are positive, let me tell you.

also, seriously, shut your trap. it's 7am. you're not the only person trying to get something done at 7am. except the thing that i am trying to get done is FUCKING SLEEP. which i am not able to do because YOU WAKE ME UP WITH YOUR MOTHERFUCKING CATERWAULING.

just shut up. seriously.

thanks.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


just warming up. the real letter will be better. a good balance of neighborly concern and shut-your- trap.

it's okay.

so, as many of you know, today went fine. but i didn't know that until later on.

i got really nervous this morning, while i was getting ready to leave, and, like an idiot, i drank some coffee, which made me feel all anxious and jittery, which was awesome when added to my preexisting nervousness.

i drove to ucsd because my mom doesn't like driving in the city much these days and i drive in everyday, so it's no big whoop for me. the drive was fine. i missed my morning radio shows, which made me feel like an old person, and also made me wonder how superior i really am when i am addicted to radio shows. i mean, is that really superior to tv? and then i realized, yes, it is. i am still morally superior. 

so that was a relief.

anyway, we drove it, parked in the lot i parked in for mom's surgery. this lot was the site of the best thing that happened to me in 2007 so far, when the cashier booth was fortuitously unmanned on new year's day, the day of our departure from ucsf after a 5 day stay, and i thus didn't have to pay the $100 for parking that i had been anxiously anticipating. 

nothing miraculous happened today, but it was a sturdy, safe, reliable place to park. ucsf hospital is the freezy-frozenest place in the city, it feels like, and we almost froze in the teeny walk from car to hospital. we got all the way up to the 8th floor to be told we needed to be across the street on the 3rd floor. i had a feeling i should have checked the logistics myself, since mom is really, really foggy on details these days, but she had assured me she wrote everything down. it wasn't a big deal. 

(having mom be such an old lady right now is forcing me to be more patient, in a good way. it reminds me of how fast i walk, how fast i eat. mom takes FOREVER to eat. or get out of the car. or...pretty much anything. and it drives me crazy, but it drives me crazy because it's really scary to me, and since i am not one to shrink from fear, i am going to get over it. she's my mom and she's dying - whether from cancer or because we are getting closer to death every day we're alive - and i have time to wait for her to collect herself, or chew her cud.)

the mri machine was in a portable outside, and i sat in an office chair reading while she got scanned. i had a really intense flashback of the first mri. that one was the morning after she was admitted to marin general the very first time. like, basically the crack of dawn about 36 hours after the whole thing got rolling. she was a bit more lucid than the day before, but still had basically no idea what was going on. i was bleary and tired and still absolutely in shock, and also still in my manic watchdog mode, afraid to let her our of my sight lest she die suddenly as i peed. we bundled her up under a gazillion heated blankets (i'd like a blanket warmer for xmas, i think. amazing.) and then the trasport guy wheeled her through the hospital and out to another freezing, rickety portable for her mri. the mri tech then was a lady who knew my mom, like about 90% of the staff who worked on her. i was really scared about her mri, because she's terribly claustrophobic, and i was worried about her not understanding what was happening, or knowing why she was going in the creepy tube. i spent the entire time basically rocking in my seat, peering anxiously into the mri room, staring intenting at her hospital-sock-clad feet for some discernible sign of a panic attack. luckily she was so zonked on morphine and having a softball sized tumor in her brain that she was totally fine, but i was a total mess.

so, i got anxious during the mri today. no rocking or moaning in the back of my throat, but a fair amount of attempting to detect signs of mom losing her shit. the machine was much smaller. (she said it pushed her shoulders in and that she came close to crying this time because it was so close. then, because she is my mom and this is why i am the way i am, she decided that crying would stop the mri, and she'd have to do the whole thing from the beginning all over again, so she would be better served by just sucking it up. fisher ladies HOLLA.) 

i watched the scans as they showed up on the machine and they looked fucking terrible. if healthy normal brains are grey, like, a quarter of her brain was snow white on the scans. from every direction, in every image, it looked, seriously, like there were equal parts brain and tumor. i asked the mri tech if the white part was tumor and he said probably. he was really quick to backtrack, and say that he didn't know, it wasn't for sure, it could be anything, but i think he thought i would lose it or something. i ended up consoling him, making him feel better. it's okay, i said, it's not a surprise. we chatted for a while and he was very nice. he really wanted to make me feel better and not get too upset. 

but i did.

i started to get really upset.

obviously the possibility of this scan being really, really bad was something i was thought a fair amount about. the chances of chemo and radiation kicking mom's cancer's ass was slim enough that it wasn't even in the realm of rational possibility. so, that means the spectrum of options had to be a range of levels of regrowth, from a little to a lotlotlot. so, it was alot. a real, real, really lot lot. so mom was for sure dying soon. like, no medicine or surgery could every do anything with that. i mean, it looked like a matter of months or something. which i had thought about before. when everything happened in december, i was kinda prepared for her to die right then. but the last few months of things feeling pretty normal were a fake out. her at the farm, going to her choir rehearsals and gigs with allen, me working and thinking about the future and the dog...it felt like the future was looking normal, if not bright.

but these scans were so not good. 

and i remembered that mom wasn't ever, no way at all, going to even see my kids during her lifetime and that is always enough to make me cry on normal, not-falling-apart-and-filled-with- anxiousness-and-fear days. i cried some, but not too much, because i didn't want the mri guy to feel bad. i went outside and tried to call shannon, but no one answered. he was getting our new bed from the delivery guys and getting it set up and stuff. so, i cried a eensy-weensy bit, and wondered if i should tell mom before the doctor told her, and then i went back in for more waiting.

i told mom when she came out, and we were both sad. it was so cold, so we linked arms and walked back across the street to the neurosurgery offices. 

(on a side note, ucsf is a good place to see both people who are crazy fucked up physically and good looking single dudes. so there's something for everyone.)

we waited a really long time to meet the doctor. like, easily an hour. but we had brought books and stuff so we hung out and admired the truly awe-inspiring view from that set of offices. the windows face off the hill that ucsf is perched on, and you can look out over the park and out to the ocean and off to the haight and cole valley. amazing and really peaceful, which is thoughtful for a place that deals with people dealing with totally lame, scary stuff. i have appreciated that view on many, keyed up and scared moments. 

the new doctor is young. dr parsa, the neurosurgeon, was probably in his early 40s, but this guy seemed like he was....35? young. clean cut, nice looking in a j crew, 'nana 'pub way. totally not at all warm, but he made up for his lack of warmth by his focus on us and our situation. he wasn't a hand grasper or one for deep sympathetic eye contact, but he had a plan, and he explained everything really clearly for my mom. he answered he questions patiently and fully. 

oh, and his reading of the scans totally refuted what that poor mri tech said, which is why this guy is a fucking neurooncologist who makes a billion dollars a second, and mri tech makes 50K a year. dr butowski (sorry about your childhood taunting, dr BUTT-OW-ski. hehheh.) said it looked like there was definitely regrowth, and nothing that could be easily operated on (which was a relief because dr. cuntface had suggested, without ever LOOKING at the scans, that mom may need another craniotomy, which scared the shit out of her) and that we would just have mom do more of the same chemo meds, only on a higher dosage for a shorter period of time. so, 5 days on and 23 days off. the regrowth was nothing to start picking out her headstone for, and this is not close to the last option. so, we've got a while before it gets to the 'lick this psychedelic toad and cross your fingers' stage. 

so, the appointment was actually kinda good, and a relief, and i was glad to have been wrong, and we celebrated with pizzeria delphina and bi-rite ice cream for me and tartine cafe au lait for mom. then we walked to my work and mom met talla and talla was charming and lovely and gave my mom a shirt that she looks adorable in. lizzi, my new co-worker (!!!) was there, too, so we all got to chat some before mom and i headed back to marin. 

traffic starting in mill valley sucked balls, and again reenforced my nervous thoughts that marin is basically la norte. mom was nice and let me listen to 'all things considered,' and we caught an interview with rufus wainwright, who mom is a new, big fan of. she felt really hip.

and we came home to my lovely clean house (which my unbelievable boyfriend cleaned top to bottom yesterday, on top of doing all the laundry - and i cried because i appreciated it so much) and a new HUGEMUNGOUS bed. it's gorgeous and a bit of a monster. i am in love already.

now we're going to see 'knocked up' and we'll hopefully laugh a lot.

i want to sum things up with some observation about life and the ups and downs and stuff, but i;m pretty wrung out from those very ups and downs and i am going to refrain. you know what i mean anyway.

tomorrow.

we have a big doctor appointment tomorrow.

mom gets her newest post-chemo and radiation scans in the morning, then we talk to a new doctor about them and what they mean and what's next.

i'm nervous.

it starts at 10am, and we'll be done by 1pm.

please think about us, 'kay?

popularity.

one of my life-long obsessions is the idea of popularity.

(i mean obsession in it's true form, like, a preoccupation to the point of negatively affecting my life. not in the newer sense of just thinking about it sometimes, or being into it. just to be clear.)

as most people who know me well know, i have really struggled with my fixation on it.

i blame john hughes movies. seriously.

seeing the stark difference between the lives of the popular kids (fun parties! sex! hot boyfriends!) and the dorks (neck braces that make it so i can't drink from a water fountain. jock straps on heads. ceaseless torment by cooler, more attractive, rich girls.) really set the stage for how i viewed the world, and how i expected middle school and high school to be. i have spent my entire life doing split second comparisons between myself and other people to decide who is cooler.

it's like life for me is a constant process of separating people into familiar groups, and deciding where i fit. i can smell a dork from 10 paces, even people who are exdorks who are cool now. i can tell. i can also tell who the coolest person in any group is. like, the king of the dipshits. i just have the radar for it.

the thing that sucks is that i am seldom very kind to myself when it comes to my comparisons. and i am not kind to others, either. i have had some really, really fucking dorky friends, and loved them to death, but i never stopped being aware of them being dorks. and i have had some friends who were total popular kids, really, really cool, and i never stopped seeing myself, and their friendship with me as a weird blemish on their cool kid record, like an aberation. 

i always end up in the middle of my mental hierarchy, with some people above me and some people below, and, because i always assumed i wasn't cool enough to be a cool kid, i aimed for being able to comfortably float between the two extremes. so i recognize cool bands, or wear expensive shoes or something, but i will embarass myself by quoting from 'lord of the rings.'

i know that i don't have what it takes to be really cool, as far as my hierarchy goes. i laugh too loud, i care too much, i am not a great conformist. being popular usually means a certain amount of predictability. and the parts of myself that disqualify me as a really cool person are parts of me that i like, even if they are cool kid handicaps. 

but i am always striving for a level of coolness that is a little out of my grasp. also, my painfully acute awareness of the entire thing makes me a lame-o anyway.

a couple of things made me think about this a lot this week.

there is a camping trip this weekend that we got invited to that totally hit my buttons. it's a total cool kid field trip, where hilarity will ensure, and memories will be made that will be spoken of by the participants for years to come. pictures will be posted. it'll be incredibly fun for them. me and shannon got invited, and i immediately wanted to go because it's the cool kids. and i like them and they're my friends, but more because the uncomfortable 12 year old in me, who wanted to be invited to the boy/girl parties and wasn't, felt like i HAD to go. i felt this sad urgency over it, like i might die if i didn't go, or i'd spend the rest of my life regretting it. when we got invited, everyone made a big deal about how the had wanted, like, 100 people to do, but really weeded out the guest list to people who would be really fun, and what that 12 year old heard was 'i made the cut! i am really fun! THE COOL KIDS HAVE ACCEPTED ME!!!' 

i started feeling worried about not going, like this was my ONE chance, where we would all get matching jackets, or bonds would be made that would be unbreakable, and if we didn't go, we would be forever on the outside looking in. also, i thought back to this one night in middle school. this story is so fucking embarassing that i should even tell it, but it's important because it has been really prominent in my thoughts about the camping trip.

some background first...

i came to a public middle school after spending my whole life at a small progressive private school where i was totally the queen bee. i had been there since i was, like, 2 and a half, and i left at age 10 or whatever feeling like hot shit. public school was terrifying and humbling. i had no idea what the fuck i was doing, but i was committed, to not being a social outcaste. like, i won't be the girl with the metal neck brace and the braces who wipes her mouth with the skirt on her sweatshirt. if you catch my reference. 

so, at orientation, i looked around the gym and i picked out the two girls who has the most other girls around them and i decided that they seemed popular, so i would become friends with them. it worked out well because i ended up liking both of them and i did become friends with them, and made lots of friends that way, but it was through a calculated assessment of the situation and a firm commitment to not being a dork, no matter what.

one of the girls in particular was fucking gorgeous. she and i were friends all through middle school and the beginning of high school and she was just so beautiful that she made everyone else in our class look like little kids. and she drank! she had a MUCH older boyfriend! she had long nails! and she was kinda mean, which sucked, but was cool because she wasn't mean to me usually.

anyway, once, in middle school, she called me and invited me to spend the night with her at another girl's house. and i wasn't home, for some reason, and i didn't get the call. at the time, i would have seriously given a kidney for that kind of invitation, and i missed it. and i was never invited out with her again. it was like i missed my single chance for the bonding and the door was forever closed to me.

it's probably better because i would've been peer pressured into doing something that sucked and maybe ended up heading down a bad path, for all i know, but the memory of that seemingly-pivotal missed opportunity has stuck with me.

and so, the idea of missing this trip felt like a chance to make up for it.

and, of course, i can't go.

the dog is still doing poorly (better, actually, but not back to normal), shannon's aunt and grandma are in town, he's working all weekend...it's just bad timing for it.

and it feels like a huge deal to me, even though it doesn't matter at all.

also, when i think back to similar situations, i have had a terrible time when i have gone to that sort of thing. i spend the whole weekend painfully aware of everything that i say and do, and feeling like an intruder. i just end up feeling out of synch, or like an extra from a western who got lost in a movie about elizabethan england. in the wrong place.

another thing has brought this stuff up, also.

there is a fundraiser concert for a guy i know, who destroyed his knees in a totally improbable scenario, and who doesn't have health insurance. he has to have reconstructive surgery on both knees, extensive physical therapy, basically learn to walk again. he's really athletic, and is a weight lifter, so this pretty much fucks that forever.

it sucks for him. 

but i made me think about my mom.

she had two brain surgeries in one month. she had months of chemo and radiation. doctors' appointments, medications, driving back and forth from her house up north, legal fees, not to mention regular bills which she also had to keep dealing with.

she wracked up a not-unimpressive amount of bills, for sure.

and not a single person volunteered to hold a charity concern for her. 

no, she doesn't have a handlebar mustache, or drive an old car, or get tattoos. she's just a lady who is my mom.

but it just seems like suck a popular kid show of solidarity, this concert.

people involved in the concert, and friends of people involved, have been posting bulletins about it ceaselessly, to the point of making me consider not going just as a knee-jerk reaction to aggressive advertising. and it made me think about 'napoleon dynamite' and the 'vote for summer' buttons and their retarded spirit team sign language dance thing and how middle school it felt. 

i don't know where i am going with this.

i guess it made me feel like i am totally not 'in there' because no one offered to do anything like that for me and my mom.

i got the money for her medical bills the old fashioned way - by calling everyone in the world to find out how she could qualify for health insurance after the fact. we negotiated a cheaper rate on a lawyer, so he could help us get her qualified. we filled out the paperwork, talked to the social workers, made deals with doctors...

and it would have been nice to not have to do that, to just have a concert thrown for me.

i'm just jealous, and reminded of that feeling of not TRULY being popular, just being allowed to be friends with the popular kids. because i am funny. or because my boyfriend is a bad-ass.

this isn't a cry for readers to tell me how cool i am.
it's just, like everything i talk about here, me sharing what i think about, and what it's like living in my head.
and this is the stuff i spend a lot of time thinking about.

finally, unrelated, some thoughts:
-lizzi worked with me this week and it fucking ruled.
-the new michael chabon book is typically brilliant, and also makes me feel alienated because i can't understand all the yiddish terminology he uses. i hate having to look things up constantly while i am reading.
-i worked my ass off this week, and was successful.
-i am feeling really creative, and my natural fears and filters are choking me, keeping me from even attempting stuff for fear it'll be dumb.
-i have been thinking a lot about death, and entropy, and how to find meaning in a world that feels like it pulls us all apart, from ourselves and each other. life can feel like we're stars, dying slowly in the middle of the vast emptiness, with the lights of other people bright, but beyond reach. how do we bridge that gap?