I guess I should go out and "get trashed" since it's St. Patrick's day, but after six hours of screaming-crying-snot-nosed-children hanging on my arms and legs, I just want to sit here. And write. And maybe get around to that stack of short stories that need editing. Hmm.

Please watch this and feel awesome about your life: http://www.doobybrain.com/2009/05/18/time-lapse-video-of-milky-way-galaxy-over-texas/ (it's a time-lapse video of the milky way through a fish eye lens. I suggest playing some sweet tunes while watching it. AWESOME!)

The gypsy is offering rubies in her calloused hand, but it's the hand, not the rubies that I'm interested in. The way they curve around her small universe. The dirtied bed of dead skin cells. The atlas of scars and discolorations, I wonder if it could lead me home. She looks at me like she has already convinced me. She looks like you. The rubies crumble in her hand. They look like me.
Some days I am the gypsy. I chase you around, trying to catch your blues, picking up your trail of breadcrumbs.
Some days I'm the witch, bloated and blind from all the goddamn sugar in the walls of my house, chain smoking inside my oven, waiting for you to come in and scold me for living so dangerously.

My favorite boys + free rum from the Caribbean + garage jams + Smiths tribute band + 
Daylight savings, beer for breakfast, redneck olympics, most beautiful morning ever. I feel that if I elaborate it will cheapen the effect. 
Good night. Good day. Good life. Wooh!

Take away the pressure but leave all the pain. You need it. Pain is like that sonofabitch rain. Sometimes a long streak of nice days get me all lost in a dream, and rain, I give you credit for that little pinch that makes me get my shit together. Reminds me of change.
Not now, for me at least. It has been a good, strange week.
I want to share something though. Last night, I finished up all my peer editing for my poetry class and, being home alone and bored, got a little high and decided to do some writing. Then I remembered I had blood oranges in the refrigerator. I haven't had a blood orange in what seems like forever, but, as funny as it seems, I wrote a piece about blood oranges a while back, and then a classmate in poetry included a blood orange image in a poem, and I couldn't stop thinking about them. I found some at the Co-Op the other day and couldn't resist.
So I place the orange on the cutting board and slice it in half with a nice sharp knife and almost shat myself when the two halves fell apart. The inside wasn't red as I expected, but a deep reddish purple, much to my delightful surprise. I thought, this is fantastic! Really, the best thing I have witnessed in a while. Observe:

I apologize for the out-of-focus-ness. But damn! Sooo cool.
Aaaand the edited version:

Case in point: blood oranges= hella cool.

Good day. Writing workshop. Sunshine. Kids.
Dear life, sometimes I enjoy you so much it's almost absurd.

"Believe in your characters."

It's the shit-eating grin, the awkward underbite, the way the eyes can never decide whether or not to make contact.

Enough about that.
Fuck I love the Misfits. Misfits fa'eva.

Springtime must be on the horizon because I am one allergetic mess. I took some knock-off brand allergy medication this morning before school, and either that shit was defunked or my body just didn't agree with it, because I was high as fuck on my way to school. So much in fact that I turned around and went back home and slept for another hour. Whew!

Reading a book of poetry that my sculpture professor lent to me: Pablo Neruda's The Book of Questions. He found out I was an English major and started asking me about poetry. He is middle aged, thin, gray curly hair with too much product in it, wears black ribbed turtleneck sweaters. Probably dropped a lot of acid back in the day. Don't get me wrong, he's a cool guy, he's just, well... he started asking me what a poem would look like if I sculpted it. I told him it would depend on the poem. He starts reading Neruda out loud to me:
And what did the rubies say
standing before the juice of pomegranates?
Why doesn't Thursday talk itself
into coming after Friday?
Who shouted with glee
when the color blue was born?
Why does the earth grieve
when the violets appear?

And so on. This book is just questions. Questions that have no answers. I had no answer. And I keep reading trying to decide if there is an answer. Neruda wrote the book of poems only months before his death in a quest for self-revelation. I'm just spinning in circles.

"How would you sculpt that? How would show the earth grieving after the appearance of violets?" I shrug my shoulders.
He tells me to stop thinking so much. "Just let it flow."
I fucking hate the word flow. It doesn't mean anything.  

What an interesting day. How awful it must feel to be so uncomfortable in your own skin.

Remember grass stains?

I wanted to paint a picture of an angler fish so I did some research and found this:

"The female Angler Fish attracts prey by dangling a glowing bulb of tissue chock full of luminescent bacteria near her rather treacherous mouth. The funny bit, however, is what the male Angler Fish does. Engaging in a sexual suicide of sorts, when he finds a female, he has sex with her and never pulls out. Over time, the male’s organs (save his testes) degenerate and he effectively becomes part of the female, upon whom he relies for sustenance. He is relegated to a life of eternal intercourse, as Pieribone took great pleasure in telling us, his rapt audience. Meanwhile, the female has grown (or co-opted I suppose) a pair of balls." (http://ionceknewagirl.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/sexy-science/)
Holy fuuuuuck.

"You see the salt on this pretzel? Look at the stars. Now, some people, they say the stars are billions of billions of tons of gas. But I think maybe... maybe it's just God's salt... and God is just waiting to eat us."

I watched Can't Hardly Wait last night. What a classic movie. It has a good message to it, to. The thing about fate, if it exists, only takes you so far. It's up to you to do the rest. Whether or not fate really exists, who knows. Who knows anything.
It was so much easier when we were young, and how could we have known?

I will probably be staying in tonight, as I did last night. Don't fret, I got my "party" fix on Thursday night. I really, really love going out dancing. Even if it's just the five of us on the dance floor. So fun. I love them.
Nine solid hours with screaming children today and I get to do it again tomorrow.
The funny part is, it's one of the best things in my life.

Driving home from work tonight, I think about how much I can't get home and get stoned and write. I'm sure the smell seeps out from under the door disturbing the general aura of the household, or maybe they just shake their heads and laugh.
Human language is a religion in itself and half of you are rotting in Hell or even worse in Purgatory. Because Purgatory was invented by the religious institution itself. Fear mongering heartless etc.
It starts and never ends, from here to bathroom walls telling you that you are beautiful, belligerently at random dive bars. Sometimes it stops me from dreaming. Sometimes I look you in the eye while you're speaking to me and I'm actually swimming deeper, retrieving copper souvenirs from the rough white bottom and you think I have a seeing problem but I'm only squinting at you because the chlorine is stinging.
What never leaves entirely. The soles of your shoes wake sleepy molecules in their stagnant cell. You watch your eyes quiver away from your head and return. Seabirds gather haughtily at a distance somewhere farther down the shore, farther than you could chase. Paint, forcefully flung to the canvas drips, gravity’s pigmented victim, and dries before it ever touches where dreams end and cold beige plaster begins.

Woe is me.
"Just pounce him."
"I'm afraid he might be unpounceable."
What I meant to say was, "I'm afraid I am unable to pounce."

That's not a very good final word. 
Grand, golden, that is everything. Tomorrow promises sunshine.
There, that's better.

The rain is dead to me. I don't like being cold and wet. I don't like driving in the rain. Kissing in the rain? You find that romantic?
I understand how essential the rain is to life, and I see it as just that- an inconvenient, yet very important fact of life. But not just that, I'm tired of hearing about it. Poets and writers across the world always have to write about the fucking rain. How it "cleanses". It's a dead metaphor. A dead symbol. I hate everything about it.

Anyway, in poetry class today we read a poem that included a Biblical reference. My professor asks, "And what is the poet alluding to here? That's right, Milton... or the Bible." I love being an English major.

Me: "I wasn't sure what kind of alcohol to get him. Usually I go with whiskey, but you don't really get someone whiskey for their birthday-"
Samantha: "Unless it's for you or me."

The more I study poetry the more I realize I don't even understand half of it.

Laundry takes a hundred hours with this attention span. Stevie makes everything better. I love you, Stevie.
Dancing between mundane folds. I am not an inherently neat person. 

I compulsively check weather sites to see how long the rain will last. Pretty solid for the next two weeks. Redundancy!!!

MXPX did NOT just come up on my iTunes shuffle.

Let's just say I was very, very happy to come home this morning.

Driving to Chico for the weekend to see some people I worked at the summer camp with. I know Chico isn't much of a vacation, but it's a vacation nonetheless. I'm excited to see everyone.

Work was great today. Professional Lava Monster.

And oh, the butterflies.

Falling falling falling, splash. In the well. One half is clinging to moments as they pass, pulling them in like hugging a security blanket. Another is slowly realizing there is
no point to any of this.
The attention whore is giving out free handjobs! You don't even have to tell her she's pretty.
Some days I feel really apathetic, some days it's an endless battle of rhetoric between the two halves of my brain and other days my nerves are playing jump rope with my intestines. Sometimes I think about how sad you have to be to write a really beautiful song.
We grow into emptiness, like blood oranges. We make little sacrifices along the way. We choose to not see certain things. It helps us "sleep better at night".
For me, it's the uncertainty that causes the insomnia.

I think the two-year-olds declared mutiny today. It started out with a simple game of "chase" with one of the shy ones- I intentionally try to break them out of their shell by, in a sense, picking on them (this includes giving them more positive attention, of course. But you can always tell which kids are cool by the way they respond to you picking on them).
A boy started attending classes about two weeks ago and is terribly shy, so every time I see him I relentlessly chase him around. At first he seemed genuinely scared- but today he turns around, says "I'm a lion!", growls at me, and starts chasing me. I think, hell yeah, we cracked another one! I mean, most of them eventually learn to trust us and like us (and it's really really awesome when that happens!) But soon enough, other children joined in on the chase, and before I knew it I had six angry-faced, snarling two-year-olds running toward me like little gremlins.
That is one of the funniest, most remarkable things I witness from time to time- children unanimously deciding to gang up on the teachers. Sometimes it happens in one terrifying instant. I have literally seen an entire class of six-year-olds chase my 27-year-old, 200-something pound co-worker up the jungle gym, only to push him back off of it (there was padding on the bottom so they could jump off and land safely) and then dog-pile the crap out of him. A swarming mass of  little arms and legs. All I could do was stand back, and laugh.
But anyway, the best thing to do when a group of two-year-olds is chasing after you is to turn around, give them a scarier face, growl, make your hands look like claws, etc. and proceed to chase them. Usually they scatter in separate directions, screaming in ear-piercing tones. A few that are beyond the act of parallel play grab onto their closest friend, or sometimes their parent, or another kid's parent- which is usually followed by a look of horror on their little face when they realize it isn't their own mom or dad. Hilarious. And then, due to a complete lack of any kind of attention span something shiny or colorful catches their eye and BAM! The chase game has dispersed. They return to climbing up slides, or throwing balls, or falling off the monkey bars and again I am reminded that a part of me will forever respond to the taunting call, "You can't catch me!"

Dear Sunshine,
I love the days that begin with you.
Sunscreen is the sweetest perfume.

To me, Valentine's day isn't about being with a significant other. It's about celebrating love- love of every kind. Jon and I went for a very adventurous bike ride, and found some cool graffiti by the railroad tracks, as documented by my new camera (thanks tax returns!)





Also:
Samantha's parents brought us their telescope! Waahebaduubsud!
And I'm taking bets on how long I can go before I get a BUI.
And I just can't stop thinking about summer and I have this wonderful feeling that it's going to be a good one.