And I just got a letter and sketch, written and drawn on the backs of receipts from various shops in Melbourne, Australia, from Soufex. I feel loved.

I am probably not going to Thanksgiving tomorrow. Mostly because I don't want to spread my cold, but I also am just not big into Thanksgiving. I hope, if I am not awake enough to say it in the morning, my parents and sister will, in my stead, give everyone a token half assed hello, eat some turkey and rolls and salad and chocolate pie, and drink excessively and say some inappropriate shit.

Heheh. I'm writing the script for my Spanish final group presentation. It includes sentences like, "Yo vi qué, tu eras hablando muchas mierda!" (I saw that, you were talking a lot of shit!) and "Yo no haría echarla de la cama para comiendo galletas saladas." (I would not kick her out of bed for eating crackers.)

I hope it amuses my group and my teacher.

"a lot of people will tell you to “see the world”. what they really mean is “have sex a lot in different locations”. the Eiffel Tower and the Hollywood sign are always going to be there, but that chick is gonna leave in twenty minutes so go talk to her and don’t fuck it up because her body is going to be WAY more memorable than the elevator ride up the Space Needle, ok?"

-Ned Hepburn, bonerparty.tumblr.com

I just want to blahblahblah about what I'm writing.

It's a novel about growing up too fast. I like to flatter myself in comparing it to a juvenile delinquent Othello. The narrator and main character is Kevin McNulty. He's the Othello: a model student, but decidedly unpopular. At the beginning of the story, this smart, charismatic, Satan / Iago character by the name of Jimmy Giuliotti, the transplanted son of a former Mafia consiglieri, introduces himself into Kevin's clique of bitter, downtrodden nerds. He wastes no time in starting to groom them into a crew of violent, drug dealing gangsters. At first it's cool, they win a few fights and start getting a little respect around the harsh social climate of their suburban high school, but that's not enough. These benign nebbishes get caught up in Jimmy's bloodthirsty quest for money, status, power and respect. They do get those things, but at a price they weren't really looking to pay, and eventually it all has to come crashing down. People start getting killed, the cops start taking notice, and those who don't die go to jail.

The big jealousy aspect is so far missing: Jimmy isn't suggesting that Kevin's girlfriend is unfaithful. But Jimmy is manipulating Kevin into helping do his dirty work, pretending to be his friend while using him to serve his own sociopathic ends.

Happy birthday, Marge!

"basically i want to be able to look at my son one day - right in the eye - and say “your mom was fucking hot”. and then we high five, me and the kid. or something. i haven’t thought all this out yet."

-Ned Hepburn, bonerparty.tumblr.com

"A lot of people seem to think it's good for smart kids to be thrown together with "normal" kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don't fit in really is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a "pep rally" at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.



If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose."

"As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere."


-www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

The good: I got another B on a Spanish test. I expected as much, it wasn't as hard as I feared, but I still made a few booboos.

The bad: I have a savage case of marksman's blue balls. Dre and I were going to go shooting after class, but the Sunnyvale Rod and Gun Club was closed. And I failed to find the Los Altos one. I've been there once before, but I must have drove right by it. I drove for a fucking hour and a half up Skyline, up to fucking Woodside, and found that there is more than one 14750 Skyline Boulevard in that general area. I was fucking pissed. And Dre spent like 100 bucks preparing for this: ammo (admittedly at my encouragement, since I had no 9mm FMJ to use, only the expensive JHP rounds which I keep on hand on the off chance I ever have cause to shoot at a living thing; and it was really expensive at Big 5, like 27 bucks a box. This isn't fucking .50 AE, 9mm Luger FMJ should not cost that much), targets, earmuffs and shooting glasses. I guess I will be sitting on that shit until next week, since she went to get her hair did and hang out with Evan, and never came back.

I am generally really frustrated and angry and bored and MREH. So what else is new.

Mreh. FML. I still have no money, so I probably will not get to go to Chicago next weekend. I'm kind of angry for no particular reason. I guess there just comes a time in every man's life when he has to get the fuck out.

On a positive note, I'm actually pretty close to completing at least an AS. As of the end of this semester, I'll be like one or two courses shy of completing my GE. But then I will probably need to take additional math and science courses if I want an actual AS, or get into someplace at all prestigious.

Going by the IGETC, after this semester's math classes, I just need to take Music 16, two more social sciences (probably General Psych and Intro to Sociology), and one or two physical sciences. I would need another humanities, but apparently Spanish 2 counts as such. After that, whammy, no more general ed. I assume I will need some comp sci classes to get an AS in "Computer Information Systems" or whatever, but then I stick a fork in that bitch. I can apply for my AS, and start applying to universities and see who will have me. (At least, according to AT, it's pretty easy to get into UIC undergrad programs, if you're not an idiot. I don't expect to get into UCB when my final GPA will probably be like 3.3, maybe 3.5 if I pick up some A's in those social sciences and art classes and/or get the two W's and one D taken off my transcript, but that's where I'm setting my sights. If I don't quite measure up to that, I'm sure I'll have no trouble getting into someplace a little less prestigious.) Then, wooohooo, real college! I've never attended a real university. It's probably not as much fun as some would have us all think.

I feel like my brain is a machine that wasn't quite assembled properly. There are a few parts missing, loose screws and washers and shit. So it looks okay, but it doesn't actually work correctly. Or at least not as efficiently as it should.

Happy birthday Krissy, I love you! Even though you are fuckin' disgusting!

Holy shit. 10 years after its original release, I actually finished Jagged Alliance 2 for the first time. It's a classic that I never quite managed to put to bed.

Totally bailed on Heald. It was way too expensive and Strategies for Success totally soured me on it. So I've spent much of my day getting everything in order for the fall semester at Mission. I just have to do a budget for the school year. My student loan debt has already gotten a bit higher than I thought, but what the hell, I'm gonna have an assload of it anyway. Sigh. I'm gonna be in fucking community college forever. At least I generally get good grades; even with the two Ws and one D, I'm still rocking just over a 3.0. I'm kinda proud of that. I'm a good student. Not superlative, but good.

My first class at Heald was like a cloud of cotton candy: utter fluff. I cannot take this tripe seriously, it's condescending. By next week I'm supposed to hand in a 'time management exercise', wherein I chart out what I do with my time for like a week, I think. Fucking pointless. I'm badly tempted to just be totally facetious and insincere, like:

"11 AM: Wake up. 11 AM -1 PM : Lie very still, staring at the ceiling. 1 PM - 3 PM : Hot gay sex. 3 PM- 4 PM : Yesterday's Indian takeout, plus unidentified pills, washed down with shots of vodka. 4 PM -7 PM : Defecate prolifically. 7 PM -11 PM : Burn down Protestant churches while brutal Scandinavian metal blares in the background. 11 PM -1 AM : Hot straight sex with Pastor Alfred's 15 year old daughter. 1 AM - 2 AM : Huge rails of cocaine with aforementioned preacher's daughter. 2 AM -4 AM : More sex. 4 AM - 6 AM : Argue and scream until we forget what we're yelling about. 6 AM - 7 AM : Makeup sex. 7 AM - 12 PM : Fitful sleep, interspersed with paranoid delusions. 12:30 PM : Jump out the window. 1 PM : Suck a dude's dick. 1:30 PM : Score some coke. 2 PM : Crash my car. 2:30 PM : Suck my own dick. 3 PM : Eat some chicken strips. "

Mmmmaybe I have been watching too much Skins. I've been hooked on that show. It's totally vicarious but I love it. It's also a veritable feast of barely legal Bristolian eye candy.

So I think I'm gonna try and get out of this. I don't have time, in the "I'm going to die someday" sense. Considering I'm fairly young and (physically) healthy, I'm very keenly aware of my own mortality. I'm constantly frustrated that I don't feel like I'm living life to the fullest, because I have all these fears and attachments and anxieties and, to my credit, common sense, stopping me. I'm twenty-fucking-seven, I can't believe it. If only everyone genuinely believed you're only as young as you feel, cos I feel like I'm 20. Really, that's why I'm in such a hurry to get educated and get a real job, cos I'm too old to keep being a slackass fuckup. It's just societal pressure, nothing more.

I start at Heald tonight. I want to say I'm excited but I really could give a toss. I'm so fucking sick of this place and my life I could puke blood. To paraphrase Fall Out Boy, San Francisco is so 10 years ago. And that's San Francisco, not fucking Santa Clara where I have lived most of my life. I need to do something crazy but I don't have any money. It's not like I can hitchhike to another continent, as far as I know.

I think the worst part of my life is that it's not just a bad dream.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -Philip K. Dick

"people are allowed free speech and should be encouraged not to get along but to disagree because the dissonance and the ability to converse with one another without violence truly is - i guess - what America is sort of about, if you get down to brass tacks. which is why hippies are full of shit, too, but thats a whole other blog entry." - boner party