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endless loss and endless gain
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| cxxviii. FIN |
[20 May 2007|12:42pm] |
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mood |
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 determined |
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it's that time again. what time? you ask. new livejournal time! cheers
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sino_rimbaud
please bear with my internet whims. too often it becomes necessary to discard the old for the new in superstitiously symbolic acts, or quoi que ce soit. i think it helps me feel like my life has some order to it too.
so to end on this 128th entry, i'm leaving myself a list of summer goals:
- get a goddamn full-time job, begrudgingly so
- write write write write write
- read read read read read
- exercise exercise
- stop taking things too seriously
- broach that topic with the family
- spend less, save more
- make time for all who deserve it
- research graduate programs
- take the goddamn gre
- eat healthier
- picnics and dinner parties!
- try to maintain dwindling french abilities
ça y est. à plus!
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| cxxvii. dream journal: take-offs & landings |
[08 May 2007|07:12pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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 hungry |
] |
we often talk in our sleep.
which is not to say that there's much beyond incoherent snippets. case in point: last night when he thrashed his arms around a bit, muttering, "son of a bitch..."
"what's wrong?" i asked, groggily bemused.
"nothing. just getting the champagne."
"champagne?"
"yeah!" he said, smiling, eyes still closed.
i dreamt that i was at another habitat party on a warm summer's night. we were serving cocktails into paper bags, a system that worked surprisingly well. i walked through the house and around the backyard twice just to make the rounds.
"nice coat," i told ben. jessica was on some sort of makeshift stage playing guitar and singing. caity and wes were smoking cigarettes on the porch.
what a magical night, i thought in my dream. everything feels so beautiful. there were an unusual amount of stars in the sky and planes passing overhead. i ran across the street to find nic. looking back, i saw a drunk girl passed out on the front lawn - but even she seemed perfectly serene and elegant.
crooned.
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| cxxvi. rounding the bend |
[02 May 2007|05:58pm] |
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mood |
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 high |
] |
A higher quality ***
Valid during many months: This is a time of creative change in your relationships. You have the opportunity to be either the agent of the changes or the object of them. Probably you will be both to some extent.
On the other hand you may experience an increase in personal power with this influence. You will have the chance to exert an influence on others either because you are in a position of some power or because your own personal vibration influences people and changes their lives. However, it is important to use this power for the general good, because it does not adapt well to purely egoistic purposes.
During this time you will seek a higher quality and greater intensity in all your experiences. You are not even remotely attracted to superficial qualities, either in people or in experiences. You need to feel with every ounce of your emotion that every encounter changes you at the deepest core of your being.
To this end you may draw people to you who are very intense and who have a very strong effect upon your mind. However, with this influence these relationships are usually quite constructive rather than difficult. Even under the best of conditions, some of what you learn about yourself may not be very pleasant until you learn to accept it, but it usually isn't so bad, even if you think it is.
Under any circumstances the overall effect of these encounters is to broaden your self-understanding and increase your capacity for complete self-expression. There may be changes in your life at this time, and your relationships may be considerably altered, but this is only so that you may experience a regeneration that will keep your life from becoming stale and dead.
thank you once again, german astrologers.
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| cxxv. dream journal: morbidity |
[29 Apr 2007|08:40pm] |
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mood |
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 energetic |
] |
we were in paris.
descending underground, i saw a subway parked on the tracks. unnerving silence.
the doors were all open and there were people inside. but as i looked closer, i noticed that everyone was slouching and still, chins resting on chests. asleep or dead, i couldn't tell.
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| cxxiv. quatre-vingt |
[21 Apr 2007|01:21pm] |
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mood |
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 anxious |
] |
two 4/20s ago, i was introduced to ziggy stardust for the first time. we lay comatose in ben's apartment after liz's cookies did their magic.
one 4/20 ago, i was in madrid with julie, probably eating chickpeas and jamón.
yesterday, jessica and i made social calls, like victorian women, to all our pot-smoking friends to celebrate together. i felt queasy after all the non-food food and the subsequent sangria and beer.
one more week of college!
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| cxxiii. un zeste de citron |
[15 Apr 2007|08:45pm] |
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mood |
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conflicted |
] |
my boyfriend is back home in texas for the week, so i'm holed up in his apartment finishing my fiction portfolio. i still haven't decided if i would rather sleep here tonight or back in my own bed - where i've been in absentia for a good two and a half months.
my neck hurts from spending too many hours hunched over revisions. the pain might also be from last night, when i drove to joshua tree for another unprepared camping trip with half a dozen friends. we slept on hard ground covered with tarp, a meager attempt to improve the situation.
i spent most of the night nursing cans of mexican beer and in consequence, peeing in the shrubbery. the weather was windy and drizzly, threatening to chase us into our cars for shelter. but sometime after midnight when we looked up, the stars were out in full regale.
"this was totally worth it," somebody said.
i felt dizzyingly small, cocooned in a sleeping bag halfway between other people's torsos. we'd smoked quite an amount of pot already. alcohol and marijuana combine in my system awkwardly these days, like dance partners that have just hit puberty. someone is always stepping on the other's toes.
i let my eyes dry up while seamlessly passing through bouts of dreamless sleep. every time i awoke, i got an eyeful of stars and a face battered by a brutal, howling wind.
i thought about texas and other places i've never been to. how remote all of reality feels, when you're laying in the desert, only halfway drunk.
just yesterday morning, i had woken up next to him. we went to breakfast at a local spot we just discovered called the cafe mermaid, where a korean lady serves up delicious and cheap bistro food. when we finally arrived at the airport, he asked if we could circle around once so he could smoke another cigarette.
once that was finished, he asked if we could pull into a parking structure. he smoked another camel and gulped down some more doña sol red wine, a huge jug i had gotten for $4 the night before.
i avoided freeways on the way home, driving alongside the runway where jet engines screeched in descent to my left. absence makes the heart grow fonder. it also makes you evaluate yourself as a separate entity again. how strange.
it's hard to believe where things have progressed. what happened to college? seems to be a recurring thought. what the fuck am i going to do? is another.
sending my resume out is a dispirited, one-way transaction so far. it's still early but the panic may set in at graduation or soon thereafter. i'm still in the dark about the status of my potential fulbright grant.
i've been blaming slow french bureaucratics for my being in career purgatory, but the truth is: damned if you do and damned if you don't. what if i did get it? what would that mean? jet off to paris for another academic year, abandon the relationships i've built here, and stumble through an awkward foreign life by myself.
what if i don't get it? where i am going to find work? i'll apply to graduate programs in the fall, but where or for what has hardly been established.
and so i'm straight up, natalie imbruglia-style torn. both of these options (my only two for now) present scary fucking challenges. i need to prioritize things, but it's so hard to exercise good judgment in weighing the emotional and the practical.
mostly, i don't like being in his apartment alone. i already had a key but i can't help but feel like a creeper. my boyfriend asked me to water the plants and feed the fish and frogs. otherwise i'm just creating more clutter here - with my books and papers and clothes everywhere. i took a nap in his bed this afternoon, and the television is keeping me company for now. what to do, what to do.
life can be quite daunting.
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| cxxii. a little cruel and somewhat unusual |
[07 Apr 2007|06:30pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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 devious |
] |
in efforts to conquer the pests in nic's apartment once and for all, we have a new tactic. right now we're conducting a trial with a test subject, a rather nasty and robust piece of roach whom we dropped into a plastic container housing quite a few venus flytraps. i want blood. juicy green roach blood.
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| cxx. americana |
[28 Mar 2007|08:38pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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 tired |
] |
| [ |
music |
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the bee gees - "love you inside and out" |
] |
driving east into downtown, the sun is blinding at seven in the morning. it feels like your neurons are fried, how overexposed the world seems. like a nuclear imprint. the heat is palpable.
it's my first experience with jury duty in the american justice system. i cross the street and enter the stanley mosk courthouse with a bevy of unhappy people, all forced into performing civil tasks to preserve the democratic momentum. we're shuffled off into one large assembly room, all two hundred of us are so. one woman directs us and streamlines the process with the measured, comforting intonations of a kindergarten teacher.
i feel bad; she must have to do this every morning. as we wait grumpily for everyone to settle, a maternal-looking black woman is about to sit facing me. then suddenly, she's interrupted.
"cookie!" someone calls out. the black lady looks a few feet behind me, and her face registers excitement.
"oh my goodness..."
"i thought it was you, cookie!" exclaims the other woman as they rejoice in their shared civil burden.
cookie, i think. why are there so many older women named cookie? and how did this come about?
i wonder about today's cookie in front of me, and where she got that nickname. because it surely can't be her real name, can it? does cookie like eating cookies? did her mother call her that after a childhood predilection? oh, cookie.
i want a woman named cookie to fall in love with a man named chip. and then they can have a son and name him hot dog.
* * *
at dinner, i'm hovering over a mound of chicken strips and quesadillas bursting with overly melted cheese. only in america could this be considered a salad.
the restaurant seems to be obsessed with making references to full mouths, with large paintings roaring, "i want my baby back ribs!" waxy über-americanized faces adorn the menu. we rush out of the chili's parking lot, smoking cigarettes.
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| cxix. wide|awake |
[27 Mar 2007|04:41am] |
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mood |
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 weird |
] |
blurry nighttime world.
my astigmatic eyes hinder me from focusing, but my mind has been terrifyingly sharp for the past few hours. i woke up to the glow of the television, my throat parched. must have been too much pre-dinner wine as usual. nic made catfish and vermicelli noodles with sautéed vegetables (including a new favorite from little tokyo - fibrous and delicious, break me off a piece of that gobo root).
i guess i'm going to run back to my apartment in the morning. when the world is real again. because this doesn't count. this purgatorial, sleepless daze where i am with no one but the hum of the fan. and multitudes of screeching car alarms.
i've been checking my mailbox bi-weekly. trying not to sweat it too much. but to be honest (i make a great effort to be as much as i can) it's kind of maddening. i like to have some sense of order in my life, but it's goddamn impossible when you don't know which side of the world you should be preparing for.
my stomach turns just at the thought of graduation, my family visiting for a week, potential summertime exile to china, and all that before even... the other thing. good thing dinner was light.
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