You never get this

I made a math joke that almost nobody will get.

It's too late
Topologize

All it requires is that
1) You have heard a certain advanced math term before
2) You have been paying attention to popular music recently
3) You have a sense of humor

Actually, it's a little hard to find people who fit under both 1 and 3 simultaneously.

She move her body like a CYCLONE

Uninspired, but that's okay. I've got a break right now in terms of homework and stuff, and that's pretty great. Real Anal isn't so hard test-wise, though problem sets still feel like constipation they take so long to solve.

It's 5:40 AM as I type this sentence, which is a problem. I went to bed at 12:30 and got up about an hour ago with my right nostril somewhat clogged and stubborn. I don't want to wake up in the morning with my right nostril completely congested for the day, so, I'm going to stay up for a little bit and embark on an excursion into my blog.

Hello, blog; how are you doing? How many doors do you have? Do these doors open? If not, are they destructible? Of course they are; anything's destructible if somebody wants to be the destructor-raaar-mecha bot. Hey, do I feel enlightened? Not really. Is this a result of Surrealism seeping into my head? Maybe. I can put the blame on it.

T-Pain is a great, great man but he's not very inspiring, I've found. I love pretty much every song he's in (except for "I'm So Hood," anything he did before "Buy U A Drank," and the song in my title), and he's definitely under the category of novelty, but for some reason he hasn't evoked the sort of thoughts or jumbles that other artists I found really novel did, like Donna Summer, ABBA, K-Maro or even My Chemical Romance did. Maybe I'm becoming less capable of these creative thinkings or less capable of thinking that what I've thought is profound. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's all.

In that case, let's get high, and let's get drunk, because we want it back now.

(Obviously that's the wrong idea, because that's a good way to kill brain cells and shit)

Baby needs his practice back

It's good that I have Thursdays to freak out. God knows that's what everybody likes doing on Thursday nights, especially alone.

Basically, I have my first Real Anal test on Wednesday. Don't get worried. It's math (the course title, I mean). We have 3 tests, our weekly homework, and the three tests include a final. So, basically, this is big. And I am so tired of this stupid proof shit, dammit! Honestly, I probably should've taken Abstract Al(gebra) this semester to see if that course pissed me off as much as this one, because I really don't want to take the sequel course to Real Anal, Real Anal II (as opposed to Small Miracles II). I have to take either Real Anal II or Abstract Algebra II. It's looking like Real Anal II (because Abstract Algebra is basically Linear Algebra pulled into hell) so next semester should be bad as well. And who knows what I'll find when I go abroad? Well, that should be easy at least. Oh well.

WHERE IS THE WINTER? It needs to come, to conform to how stagnant my friends at Tufts are mostly currently being. Then I won't be able to complain about a lack of moving around outside in the midst of weather that's so made for moving around in. I should probably start running, and every day at that. That means I'd have to get up to run, though, since, um, otherwise I'd end up running at night, and that's probably not as safe. I probably shouldn't be tooling here, since they've got work, too, and usually more than I do. Ugh. ... that's a conundrum.

The winter needs to come. Then I can listen to The Killers in the cold again and love it. That's basically what I did last semester through the cold. And that cold, believe me, lasted almost the entire semester, and disappeared as quickly as it surfaced.

My dorm is still bad. It's so ugly and depressing from the inside. At night it looks so pretty with the light on top of the building, but that's hardly compensation for how ugly it looks on the outside and the inside during the day. Basically, I don't like it. Also, the light in my room is badly positioned. And our building has a dining hall downstairs, so this stupid vent comes on at precisely 4:59:50 AM each morning as the dining hall's machines get started. So much for morning serenity.

Do I ever write on this blog when I'm happy anymore? Damn.

What's love?

Well? Woo, yeah, slow down, baby.

Sophomore year has so far been a disappointment, but not a major one. However, a confusing one. I can't see what's going on, but sometimes you realize all of a sudden how much you miss or you've missed someone. It's just crazy. Either way, I really miss my old dorm room. Soooo spacious, and so liberating. Just, fucking awesome. I wish I had a mirror. I don't have a mirror in this room, and it figures that it's the time when I have the least acne on my face that this happens. Yeah.

I also miss having my last roommate as my roommate (apologies to the current one), but I realize that there's no way the same situation could happen again. He's really, really busy now, but I miss the 4 AM hour craziness, and all that shit. His desk lamp, our crazy shouting at 5 AM, speaking Japanese, English, and French interchangeably (and one time, he spoke Cantonese and I spoke Filipino just to be bitches to each other and see who gave up first (I did) )... gone!!! We're about a 10 to 15 minute walk away from each other by dorm, which sucks. SUCKS!

Anyway, short words first, I can't get laid, but I don't ever want to make the first move; so it goes. Well, this isn't completely relevant, BUT!: oddities have arisen, really. If you sleep only 7 hours a night, no less and no more, things are really odd. And that's my life so far this year, really. That's funny, because it's 2007. Really good, God. Or whoever invented the years system that puts us at 2007 AD.

Both my legs are in grave, grave danger of cramping. I guess I should try to really hydrate myself. Like, seriously, I tried to stretch out my right leg while walking and almost got an instant cramp. Oops. Why is this? It must be stress. Because my classes are big-boy shit now, and that's, uh, scary. Expectations to fill, expectations that you have to determine for yourself, or something?

The dance thing tonight was quite boring because the group of people wasn't right. It just wasn't. Oh well. There was some good music, but it averaged just above mediocrity, which isn't good.

I'm scared, but that's because I'm tired. Try to catch me tomorrow and my brevity will sack your brevity metaphorically.

That's right, I'm tired of this and semantics and I just wanna go to sleep, drift away into happy land...

I'm havin' a private party... on SO EXCLUSIVE

india.arie wrote a good song entitled Private Party. I'm listening to it now. Sometimes I wish she were a man so that I could sing the songs and actually have the lyrics apply to me.

I'm havin' a private party
Learnin' how to love me
Celebrating the woman I've become

Uhh... yeah. Haven't become a woman and I can't say that's under my to-do list.

I just had to write my biography for my piano concert coming up and I realized that I really haven't done much at Tufts in regards to that dastardly word "extra-curriculars." Time passes way too fucking quickly at college and there's not much that you can do about it; and so it goes on. It really does. I swear, if you want to get involved in a club, you HAVE to do it extremely early, quickly, and STUFF. It's really peeving, miffing, vexing, and irking.

Today sucked because I didn't get to play outside. I'm speaking in kids' terms but it's obvious that that's why today sucked. When your sleep schedule is fucked up and you have commitments in the later afternoon: oops, you suck at life! That's me right now: sucking not in, outside of, or apart from life, but at it. Yes. @life. Sleeping from 6 or 7 AM to 2 or 3 PM isn't good.

But it don't matter, no: because I'm going to the Philippines quite soon. So right now, I'm just like, what's the point? But there is a point: the piano concert. So I'm stuck in a sort of discontent that's the result of the inconvenience of my sleep schedule. Sucks to be stuck.

If I tried to sleep now I'd just fall asleep four hours later and sleep badly because I'd inhale too much dust (my room sucks).

Am I ready? Boo. (thumbs up) Yes. Long, long yesterday...

We've been here before: French paper 3

This is really starting to burn me. I feel drizzles of pain on my neck, falling from the teardrops of fire that are escalating my wall of symbolic impotency that I sense from my INCAPABILITY TO WRITE A FRENCH ESSAY.

Why can't I do it? Okay, so it's a lit essay, big deal. French essays, lit essays, French lit essays, I've done that! But again nothing is making sense.

Ugh. This really sucks. I'm thinking comma when I want to write a period. I'm thinking details when I want to think thesis. I'm thinking English when I want to think in French. Soooo it gooooes. Stop howling at me, Vonnegut. Away, scat, away from me, I tell you, or I'll have your neck. Or is that head?

Ugh, I just erased a paragraph from this blog, because I totally don't want to say that. Am I being too perfect? Doesn't the best stuff come from imperfection?

I guess, maybe. But I'm not coming upon any new epiphanies.

In a relationship, I want someone who is

Distanced enough so that I can rise when I'm on fire, close enough so I can land safely when I'm burning down.

And me, in 2000

The French writer Stendhal wasn't famous when he was alive, but he sure looked forward to being it when he was dead. He said that he would look forward to "the souls that [he loves]" reading his works after 1900, when he would surely be dead. I think. Anyway, regardless of how accurate that is, I wrote on my paper: "et moi, en 2000." My brain's not quite right right now. But that's funny, isn't it? One of the little things that amuses me for no particular reason and to no particular end is the fact that 2000 just isn't important anymore!

Unfortunately, y2k.gov is gone. It was hilarious when it was still there: your tax dollars at work. For 2000. For forever. For history.

Not. That didn't happen. New topic.

To quote K-Ci and Will Smith: "We're gonna party like it's nineteen-.... HOLD UP, IT IS!" Yet that song still fuckin' lives. I know Ashish hears me. WILL 2K!!! rockin' the dancefloor better than the Clash rocked the casbah or whatever that is. Check that; I can't say that; I've never heard the Clash's "Rock the Casbah." Maybe in passing.

So goes it. So goes it!

A dream-memory

I was in the process of dreaming a few minutes ago. I got up and was a bit too dehydrated to continue getting up, so I went back to sleep. Usually, when that happens, my body goes through this really powerful sleep cycle where I always feel much better when I wake up and where I always dream. That's what happened today. And I had a very interesting dream.

I was playing in a basketball game and I lost the game when I threw this grape that resembled an orange to a player on the other team who looked like a kid I knew from 8th grade named Bobby Hadden. But not really, now that I think about it--he's just the most similar name to that face. Yes, we lost the game because I gave food to the other team, misunderstanding some rule. So I left with someone who I forget, possibly Ashish, and we went driving through Seoul. Yes, we were in Seoul. We saw a lot of Korean bunnies. They were gray and they were all facing in the same direction, and some of them were shaped like reeds. They looked cute but fierce so we didn't stop to pet them. At some point we had to have stopped driving because I was on my feet when we realized what the bunnies were looking at---a soldier pushing a guy dressed in white into a grave. I said to Ashish (or whoever it was) that this must be an execution. And then I realized that this was not the only execution--this was happening all over the bunny garden.

All over the bunny garden.

And so I walked away from ashish past a couple of new graves and I made the sign of the cross and began to pray because, well, that was what I felt was right to do, and I was thinking that it didn't matter whether I had the faith in my head or not that was connected to the symbol. Then my friend Stanley from Tufts randomly came into the scene and he's like "Hey, Alex."

I gesture him over and I'm like, "Shh. There's an execution going on, I think."

That's the end of the dream.

Am I still in the bunny garden?

In memory of...

She's gone. Forever.

Danuta Sava-Wysocka, I think. I really hope I didn't spell her name wrong. But she died at 60 a couple of weeks ago, and I just found out. She was in the Chopin Conservatory of Music, and she taught voice. I remember her so well - all those concerts where she would accompany her singers on the piano, overpedaling, but she was just so charming. I will always remember her smile, and I've never said that phrase before. Not even for my deceased grandmother.

She's gone. Forever.

My grandmother on my dad's side died last year in February. I didn't get to see her final days, but my dad did, and I wonder whether he was traumatized. She had had a stroke after falling in the bathroom, which basically made her unable to do anything. So, she was in the hospital... She refused to eat anything but little pieces of ice cream, and my dad sat there with her, without a word -- a simple, single, comprehensible, communicative, message-sending word -- leaving her lips. This continued until she died, probably from starvation; I don't even remember. God, I even forgot that the one-year anniversary of her death passed. I feel guilty sometimes that we didn't visit her that often after my grandfather, her husband, died. It corresponds with us (or me at least) forgetting about her one-year death anniversary... God, I can't help but feel like I missed out on something.

They're gone. Forever.

And so my childhood is gradually passing away, like strips of wallpaper peeling themselves off the surface, bit by bit. These days I've been feeling more like I'm in the physical state of being an adult now, and I can't explain it, but it is just that way. You know, I didn't think that those monthly piano recitals would ever end. And now, I know there's one part of them that I can never return to... she's gone. When my grandmother died last year, I lost the cubbyhole of my childhood that was Cape Cod. You know, a little dusty in there, but that's where you go to get your stuff to play, your cubbyhole? Cape Cod attacked me with allergies, but before I picked up nihilism my junior year, Cape Cod was the place where I always came to just enjoy life and play, having a real childhood experience, and Grandma and Granddad, I thank you for that. Whenever I return to the Cape, I feel a certain impotence, because I can never have that back.

Which is why I will appreciate every moment with Lola while she's here.
This 90th birthday will be a blast for her, and for me, and whether I'm a kid anymore, I can end this phrase saying that I am coming home.

let. me. speak.

begin - with a bouncing ball falling off a stairwell descending into a pit of lava hell and it might as well since that's really all it's got to do there and we should just let the laws of physics work

well it bounced and fell and did it well but that's no end of story

let's go let's bounce let's pounce - oneachother and movin out and movin in let's fall into our lonely sin and bounce and bounce and bounce with it and shit did you just change the rhyme into thyme of time of times we left and times we've made and times we've settled, let's behave, so don't get fussy and don't get prattled and begin to begin to begin to begin.

that's right, to begin and change me within so I can on limb, a-hop a-hop and bounce and swell and bounce and swell and Listen up this one's from the back of the party comin to the front of your naughty hair tufts that's right it's all comin up to you now what you say what you say

said iron wing and i'm a man for better things so let's not stop to commiserate or procreate or uncreate this creation, develop, fall, develop, fall, develop, develop, develop, develop, envelop...

so they closed up shop and locked it up and pianos too? is this fucked up and give me something more to drink from air to air and do not blink

where the fuck's my piano when I need it, where the fuck's my piano when I need you? stop and that's dramatic; cock up your automatic, and drive.

---

I really need a piano. Or a microphone.

This is the stuff that I'd normally express on piano, and that's where it all comes together better. And right now, this French paper is NOT working out.

Je t'adore and I can't contain it

I really don't know what's going on.

J'ai une « dissertation » d'après Mme. Henein; un « devoir » selon Mme. Naginski. En fait, j'ai un problème. J'hésite trop à dire ce que je voudrais dire, je souffre d'un manque d'imagination, et je me trouve absolument fouetté par un amour que je ne sais pas comment poursuivre. Qu'est-ce que je dois faire ? je ne sais pas. Je travaille depuis quatre heures sans rien écrire d'utile pour ce « devoir », et le mec à qui appartient mon coeur s'assied là-bas, à peu près de l'imprimeur. Lui, c'est une meilleure distraction que les connasses qui détruit la paix en dehors de ma porte chaque soir. (Il paraît qu'ils finissent leur travail l'après-midi. Comment ????) C'est pourquoi je suis à la salle des ordinateurs au lieu de chez moi.

Alors, de toute façon, je me trouve ici, beaucoup de morceaux de papier, beaucoup de remarques, aucune idée qui peut former une bonne thèse. J'ai remarqué : oh, l'auteur a fait ça, il laisse des symboles pour nous mordre, il fait un rêve symbolique... mais il faut que je dise comment Hugo plaide la cause d'un condamné quelconque. Mon dieu, je ne peux rien lier.

Ah, attends ...! c'est un cauchemar au lieu d'un festival. Le festival, c'est ce qu'on appelle le guillotinage, à cet échafaud qu'imagine le condamné dans cette scène que j'analyse.

Et puis, tout de suite, je perds toute l'abilité de penser. JE M'ASSIEDS ICI DEPUIS QUATRE HEURES ET N'Y A-T-IL RIEN QUE JE PEUX EMPLOYER???

2007 is nowhere-land

Welcome to 2007. This number is divisible by 3, but that's something easily established. This is shaping up to be one of the most dry years on the planet. (There are dog years too!)

This is about as good as sleeplessness, the state of mind I'm in right now, where NOTHING COMES INTO MY HEAD but I can still put good shit out. Why?

I should've gone home this weekend and gained access to a karaoke machine, instead of spending 6 hours last night playing mah-jongg. That was fun, but it did shit for me. Now I have a French essay that I don't really frikkity-feel like doing and it's staring me right in the face. :( That image, rotated pi/2 to the left, represents an approximation via Oiler's Method of my face right now. I can't stare back.

I'm not ambivalent. I'm not apathetic. I'm not disgusted, I'm not passioned. What's going on??? I can't bring anything together!

This thing is in shambles. Maybe I woke up too early two days in a row. Well, there's nothing I can fucking do about that because of my painful, painful schedule. All I can do is listen to My Chemical Romance or something and be emo for a couple of seconds. Holy shit, 3:36 AM! Does that constitute an hour's break? That's my Constitution for the day. I couldn't make a better one for you.

Fear

The most powerful emotion is fear because we can be afraid of our other emotions.

Study shows that angry freewrites are caused by lack of sleep

In any case, you guys deserve a better, happier, more acceptable freewrite than that. So let's go

Last night, I had dreams that I remember. I came across Ashish and Greg playing frisbee in a parking lot with 5 other cars there, one perpendicular to the others. I got to speak to Condoleeza Rice. I asked her, "What was the hardest part of switching from Secretary of Defense to Secretary of State?" I know, I know; that wasn't her past position. I don't remember her answer, unfortunately. I had another good part of that dream. There was also a very sexual part that I will not tell you about. No, don't worry; it didn't involve anyone I know except me.

Or did it? Well, none of you anyway.

When I lack sleep, I don't feel the correct pain. I knew I should've been physically tired, but I wasn't. Now I'm feeling it. When I've slept like a tick, usually the pain that I feel is more social, or something. For instance, it bothers me subconsciously when my music tastes get attacked and I'm tired. I have to be tired for this to be true.

This is why I try to get a lot of sleep. Of course, I should train myself to be ready for those situations where I don't have enough sleep. Everybody should train himself for situations of some sort of duress. Like Kramer or whoever should've trained himself not to be a racist shit. Hey, I'm serious. You've got to find your stupidities, weaknesses, or prejudices or whatever and crush them. You turn into a different person when you're tired.

Like De La Soul said, it's just me myself and I.

Classic rock sucks.

Really, I don't know what the big deal is. Ever since WZLX put that commercial up for its station with the stupid laughing lips I have hated classic rock. That, of course, doesn't tell the whole truth. Ever since my grandmother was born in 1917, I have hated classic rock. All the flaws that classic rock fans point to in pop music are there in classic rock music, but nobody admits it: dull repetition, unenthusiastic vocals, awful placement of musical emphasis, bad vocals, usage of the same instruments over and over again, and unimportant lyrics, the latter of which isn't really a flaw but is apparently much more obvious in pop music (shit no). Yes, I'm pissy because I've been sleeping like shit.

Life as metaphor // What's wrong with my room

LIFE AS METAPHOR

About half an hour ago, I was reading Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. This'll be the tenth novel I've read of his, and the tenth since September 2006. That's a lot of reading. The main character, Kafka Tamura, does a lot of reading, too. In a conversation with a librarian, Kafka states that he doesn't really know what he's gotten out of his reading, or why he likes an imperfect book more than a perfect book. The librarian eventually gets to a quote by Goethe: "Everything is a metaphor."

I don't know anything about goats, but I certainly don't know anything about Goethe. However, this Goethe knows something about life, just like el seÑor (I don't know the lowercase n-tilde. Okay, I could figure it out in 5 seconds, but I knew that one by heart, so whatever) Hussey knows something about a certain general philosophy of life. It's just true that random trivial shit (note how that phrase is both descriptive and vague at the same time) can help us make sense of our lives. And this time My Refrigerator was a metaphor.

Shit, I didn't even get that right. My Freezer was a metaphor. Now... Because I haven't done anything really productive for the past n days and because I've been staying up until 8 AM the past two nights, I decided to find something to do, and I realized I could do something that no human, no dinosaur has ever attempted: clean out my freezer. I didn't even really do that, because I have no clue what my mom, uncle, aunt, and grandmother actually use in there to cook. For all I know, they could use green peas from 1998 for antiquated value or something just like they do with wine. (Don't ever ask me to develop a taste for wine. You'd waste my time, and that's vowel rhyme, PUNK!) In any case, what I did is clean out the stuff on the door's shelves, and even wash two of the removable shelf thingies that I emptied with success. I moved the ice packs that I saw in the main section of the freezer to the shelves, and then I looked.

What I saw was that removing things from the confiture that was My Freezer actually led to the potential for things to slip out if you opened the door. When everything was stuffed in there, there was a delicate, not-supposed-to-be-there balance. Now, a big pile of old shit remains, old shit that I didn't get to cleaning out because I wanted to do this freewrite, and it's created this slope whereby new shit can fall out. (You notice how I'm writing this as if it were a textbook, with italics and everything? I should become a teacher and then go on to write real textbooks. Like, this is how people really write. We don't use inflated terms like "verisimilitude" or "eros"; you'd understand stuff like "old shit" or "hot shit" much better.) Yarr, that parenthetical expression was too long. (Also, yarr, not yaar. That's different.) But let's sum things up.

This freezer was wrong. It was just far too filled, and things needed to come out. That, of course, created the problem of the slippery slope. But should I regret beginning to clean out the freezer? Fuck no; this isn't the end of the story, and I can go on to finish cleaning when I feel like it. Here's how this is a metaphor. There are times in your life (and I should say in addition that there have been and will be times in my life) when you will have too much shit piled up in your life. You'll get used to it; there is a balance there. But it's either a painful one or just wrong. It shouldn't exist. The minute you remove shit, you might disrupt the balance. It gets increasingly difficult to remove more shit. But, yeah, but you've just gotta get rid of it.

There was a delicate balance to my uh stress-life at SJP. I know enough now to be wise and to say that it wasn't really all that good. You can say, "Sure, there was all the hard shit and shit, but it was good," but allow me to flip that around and say, "Sure, there was good shit, but there was a lot of hard shit." I did not like the atmosphere when I visited on Friday, December 15, and I'm probably not going to like it either on Tuesday, January 9.

But that doesn't mean I'm not going back. Good shit be there, too. I'm not throwing everything outta my freezer.

---

WHAT'S WRONG WITH MY ROOM

My room is a dusty fuck-nut case. Rearrange those four words if you want, but overall you're not going to find real precision, and overall all you need to know is that I overall don't like it. My room is a nutty fuck-dust case. I hate it when I get there and dust-things start crawling up my nose, ears, the small spaces between my eyes and my eyelids, and other orifices north of my nipples. Man, I don't like sleeping there. It's just difficult. I can never bring myself to clean it, though. Something's wrong.

What's wrong is that my bed takes up about 70 percent of the ground space in my room, but that's looking at it from the cleaning perspective. I think something else is wrong, too. My roomy dusty fucky nutty case is. In other words, I don't know!!!

...what's wrong. Well, I don't know the whole story, to be more precise. I can beat into the heart of the matter, however.

Thrown upon my white wall at some point are some artifactoid things. Don't know if that word exists, but the suffix "toid" just has that kind of tone that overall bothers me, and so you can see that the fact that these things are in some way "artifacts" overall bothers me. That's too long. Of a sentence. Okay. The shit on my wall bothers me.

Imagine you're looking out my window, onto the street where we play frisbee at 3 AM. (Well, it's never gotten that late, but you have the feeling it might if we don't do something about it!) We have up on the left, up up up, a picture of me being pulled in a sled as a baby. Something's illogical about the sled. How on earth does sledding work if you're pulling someone down the hill? That's gravity's job, right? Well, whatever; that's just me being there as a kid, excited as ever about something that is logically unexciting. Snowy snow is there. Why don't we have some fucking snowy snow???? Anyway. That picture must've been there for ages, in its faded red frame, going unnoticed forever. Oh, don't be mistaken by my tense usage; it's still there. I've just gone back to not acknowledging it.

Also adoringly adorning my wall are a poster entitled "All About Me," which I made in 1st grade, but which Sister Theresa kind of messed around with when she replaced my submitted All About Me paper with another one; whatever; her directions weren't clear or something and so it's her handwriting, not mine, on the paper that's on that poster;; a multitude of baseball posters from the 1999 MLB All-Star Game Exposition;; a framed poster of our 2004 World Champion Red Sox featuring Mark Bellhorn;; an AREA-ONE concert poster (the only real concert I've ever been to) from July 2001;; I don't remember the rest.

Ugly cheap-feeling plaid curtains don't perform their job as shades for my window because I never need them to block out the sun, for that is what I do with my eyes when I sleep. Dust adorns my nut-colored cabinets and drawers and whatever they call the big things of which cabinets and drawers are a part. Oh, dressers. They're just complex cases. I have a plastic belt-rack whose name comes from its purpose but which only barely serves its purpose with the one belt I actually use. A dust-filtering thing that's never done much work sits upon one of my dressers. Bellhorn's not looking at it, but he might be looking up at my two hanging lamps, both of course dusty. A broken DO NOT ENTER sign sits in my opened, wide, opened-wide clothes closet. Steven and I used to play with that sign all the time when we were younger and pretend to be Power Rangers. You can see the names of two of them written in permanent marker atop the sign: "Billy and Tommy." I think I was always Tommy and he was always Billy, or something; whichever one was cooler and more forceful. Teddy bears and other stuffed non-taxidermic animals sit atop my tan-colored wooden bookshelf. Where bunnies become dust-bunnies. You can bet that any kid allowed to play with those things would be sent to the hospital right away with dust poisoning, if that even exists. My bed is covered in gleefully boring, passively masculine bedsheets. The floor is pathetic pink carpeting. It's pretty ugly. It amazes me how much I've been able to refrain from thinking about it, because it really is awful. It's the same color as the plexiglass stuff that's in our attic.

That's my room. You guys haven't seen (much of) it.

An aside (yeah, I know, the shit above sounds like an aside, but this is more of one)
One night, a few nights ago, I realized that I don't recall ever having seen the closet doors closed. So I tried to close them. IT DOESN'T WORK. You can connect that to what Goethe said. That might be dangerous, but remember what I said about My Freezer.

END ASIDE

What's wrong with my room. What's wrong with my room?

The wrong shit lies in the fact that I haven't decorated my room in the longest time. And I know I'm living most of my life in college from here on out for four years or eight years or whatever that truth is, but I feel like I really need to decorate my room. Not redecorate, decorate. That means a complete renewal. There's so many vestiges of my past (is that even the right word, "vestige"?) that this room just isn't what I want it to be. If it's something to live in, then I want it to be that. Let me look at all my old shit later, when I'm 65 or something! You know the guys who decorate their room with whatever bands or items or sluts that they were into at the time? Well, I've never been that guy, but it's time to bite the dust, or face it, or something, so that my room isn't the cased up fucked up dust-nut it's been for the past x years. Teddy bears, out. The teddy bears aren't even good ones; now Rajesh had some good teddy bears. He had good taste in those. Well, I didn't buy any, so those things must've been quick Christmas purchases, and boy it shows. Killers poster, in. You have no idea how good (some of) that album Sam's Town is. Shitty-looking 1999 All-Star Game Exposition (I mentioned this without explaining it and it's not worth explaining) poster, out. Illogical sledding picture, out. All About Me poster, out. Curtains, ......... do you think I'm a woman? Okay, if you think that I'm going to "hop over in my minivan" to Bed, Bath, Venus, and Beyond to "spruce up" my "chamber" then you just filed a request for your teeth to be punched in and subsequently pulled out. (Fuck, that sucked. I was never good at fightin' words.)

In the end, I realized that I need to redecorate my room. That's it. That's so simple, but I just had a lot of fun explaining how I got there. Unfortunately, I lack decoration supplies, so my room will remain a dust fuck nut casey-at-the-bat strikeout until morning. Check that: until afternoon.

Crackademics

So here's a no-thoughts freewrite.

Nah, that's not possible, though I've gotta believe that this vacation has been predominantly mindless. Aside from discovering how amazing india.arie's songs have gotten and reading a bit of Murakami, most of this vacation has been "floating free," without the hyphen. I'm actually listening to "Love Like Winter" by AFI right now; okay, not anymore, but yes, this is another part of the mindlessness.

Mindlessness is not necessarily a bad thing. Recall the yin-yang principle. Bad needs to exist for good to exist, and vice versa (I guess). I think that in order to be more mindful, we need to be mindless for a certain amount of time. Oh, never mind the phrase "I think." Everyone knows this; it's just that it's nice to acknowledge it.

I've had a lot of nice thoughts, but I've been too lazy to scribble them down. Well, here's one that I don't find nearly as interesting as any of the others, but that most of you will because it relates directly to the me that you know (e.g. valedictorian etc.). I got my first official B+ mark since 1st grade, where I got a B+ for effort from Sister Theresa. Well, I don't recall any B+ grades since then. The person who gave me this mark is Professor Hosea Hirata, the chair of the Japanese department at Tufts and absolutely one of the smartest people I have ever seen, probably. Major Japanese Writers, the class; the only writer we studied being Haruki Murakami. You'd think I wouldn't be satisfied with that grade, but I was.

First of all, it's about time somebody shot me down academically. I'm not that good; you've got to stop me somewhere so I can actually figure out what career I'll enjoy for the rest of my life.

Secondly, the B+ looked nice among my other grades. I got these: B+, A-, A, A+. A satisfying sequence, like many of the sequences we study in math. The 1/x sequence isn't all that satisfying, though.

Numéro trois, to complete Klein's "tricolon," I was hella nervous as to what I was actually gonna get for that class's grade. My 10-15 page essay (which ended up being 13 pages) looked to be very nice personally, but I had no idea how he was gonna take it. Plus, he hadn't given us a grade throughout the entire class. Journals, class participation, presentations (which were really just our commentaries on the chapters), nothing. I thought my class participation was really kick-ass at times; other times I was just too tired and/or bored. It really depended on how much sleep I got, unfortunately. So the B+ grade was a nice relief.

Item number four, to ruin the tricolon, I'm on Dean's List anyway.

To make this a set of quintuplet-baby-thought-paragraphs, I'll end with the fact that this grade satisfies me because I can move on from it, and it's not based on any inadequate objective procedure or mathematical formula of determining my performance in my class. It's really just what came up in his head when he considered everything that I've done. And it's nice to know what he honestly thought: B+. And just like I did when I got that B+ for effort in 1st grade with Sister Theresa, I realize that I can do better. And judging by everything that's happened since 1st grade, I'm sure that I can and will do better. Second semester: It'll rock.

--
I ended this nicely, but I'll be articulating better freewrites for you later on.
--

/me changes title

Oh, fuck, here's a better way to end this: My dad said that sex is like crack. But I think I know what my crack is.

I love my shoulder

My shoulder's so amazing
Let me sit back and count the ways
1. it feels like shit
2. it's legit
3. and I don't get it

Okay, sorry for that tumultuously weak parody of I Love My Chick by Busta Rhymes (featuring will.i.am and Kelis). But yeah, my shoulder is behaving very badly and I think it was a snowboardingsledding injury. What is snowboardingsledding? That's when I ride my sled like a snowboard like an ass. Okay, please read that sentence correctly.

See that's my chick
that's my chick
that's my chick
and she can get it

Yes, I would've invited you all to sled here but the rain kind of fell and you were all drinking champagne. And I was watching Fergie. God, she's marvelous. Did she perform Fergalicious last night? If only I could've seen it.

I've figured one thing out, though, over the course of Fall-into-Winter 2006. When we get traumatized, whether it be in the slightest or in the most, we tend to create a fantasy world for ourselves. This fantasy world lasts for as long as it takes to recover from this trauma. I learned this only partially from personal experience, and much more so from other people's experience and from my new favorite writer, Haruki Murakami.

He's a really good writer. I highly recommend reading anything by him.

"Here we are, me and you, feeling lost and feeling blue"

That's a lyric from ABBA's Happy New Year. I don't know about any of you, but I'm feelin' this song right now. Because 2006 was just the best year ever for me, and possibly my strongest year ever. I'm honestly sad to see it go. Good-bye, number 2006, divisible by 1003 and 2 (the former of which I think is prime... let me think... NO IT'S NOT it's divisible by 17 and 59. Yes, I can run prime number tests through in my head. You just keep checking with increasing prime numbers, e.g. 3, 5 (well, not really; if it's divisible by 5 you should see that immediately), 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23... and at 17 I got it. And I know 59 is prime so I basically know all the things by which "2006" is divisible.).

Good-bye, 2006. May you and Gerald Ford rest in peace.

Things look more noble when they're hyphenated. This concept of "Good-bye" is like "whoa man that's an honorable bye!!!"

Everybody enjoy this year 2007, which is divisible by 3.