islanded in a stream of stars

I keep randomly seeing strangers who resembled people that I know. I still remember the last time I went out with dragonfly66 to lunch I spotted a Paly student who might have been Cathy without the magenta highlights. I could've sworn that I saw Mekkie at the drugstore the other day but that's impossible. There was a guy at the supermarket who looked rather like eyepiece_simile's brother, albeit somewhat older, and it suddenly struck me that shakeitdown's significant other reminds me in appearance of an elementary school classmate of mine named Evan. Is there some kind of weird convention of genetic doubles (Project Helix participants?) going on that nobody's bothered to tell me about?

Oh, by the way-f you ever happen to see the rather melodramatically entitled docudrama "Murder at Harvard"-the actor playing the part of John Webster bears a really freaky resemblence to my behaviorism classmate, Bow Tie Man, down to the sideburns and glasses. I don't think that John Webster is good at disco dancing, though.

(I think that if you mentioned "bow tie man" to anyone at Harvard this past summer, they'd know to whom you're referring. I was sort of freaked out on the day of my final when he wasn't wearing his Harvard "veritas" logo bow tie and had ominous notions of flunking in my head just because something felt wrong with the universe.)

I've finally decided on a few New Year's resolutions. As I feel a bit idiotic for coming up with them so late, let's just claim that I prepared them in advance for the lunar new year at the end of this month. They are:

1) Say more nice things about people that I'm normally too shy to say.
2) Meditate more often; I haven't really since December 1, 2004. I could really stop doing the angsty freak-out all the time.
3) Go running around the neighborhood more often to exercise and meet some of my new neighbors.
4) Stop hitting the snooze button so much, i.e. fewer than 23 times (my all-time record).

On the trend of never quite knowing the time, I've been listening to a lot of seasonally inappropriate music lately, songs with words like "spring" or "summer" in them. And people keep giving me strange looks whenever I hum Christmas carols. I'll probably stop sometime in April, but I give no guarantees.

To my fellow classmates and IHL-ers: dear fluffy eena-chan will be visiting after school on Friday, so if you want to hang out with her this is your chance.

I actually drove in a relatively sane manner today. I ended up listening to my Secret Agent Man Meets the Saint album. It's tremendously fun driving music, especially when you're driving on the highway. Coming back home today I accidentally went the wrong way while on Alpine Road, but I then I found the 280 on-ramp, so it was all good. It's nice being able to find your way around when driving by yourself.

I managed to find a parking lot about seven minutes away from Green so Thea and Laurel took about twice as long to reach the library. Near the end of the day we wandered into the Education Building for a look around. Many memories for me there-I used to have some of my writing classes from that Bohemian summer writing camp. Thea, Laurel, and I ended up having lunch at 4 o'clock because we were so busy microfiching, and if we left our machine we would never be able to get any work done because the other schools were monopolizing the rest of the materials.

I wandered around the South Stacks for the first time and had much fun randomly running around in boots. There's this long straight corridor that you take, and once you start running through it you feel like you're in some sort of suspended time corridor, and you can hear the air whooshing past your face. It sort of reminded me of when I used to run track when I was a lot younger. I always ran the last leg ("anchor") in relay races, and I remember having a really great time with my teammates.

I guess the weirdest part about this weekend at Green is how at home I feel on the campus. I still remember where everything is after living at Grove Lasuen for two weeks, and everything just feels so familiar to me. Heck, a student actually asked me for directions to some dorm. I guess it's all those fond memories from camp that make me so enamored of that place. I'd like to spend more time on the weekends there if I could, if it didn't sound like such a crazy idea.

I want to go watch some Prisoner or SA/Danger Man right now, but I unfortunately don't have either DVD collection. I would go watch this week's BBC America Avengers except that my dad's watching the Super Bowl right now. Gah!

You know what was weird? During dinner tonight I blinked once and for a few moments I looked at my parents and thought, "Who are these people? Am I related to them? Why am I here with them? Do we know each other?" It was more a weird sense of unfamiliarity than anything else. It was almost as if I was somebody else for a moment. Crazy thoughts, huh?

My brain's been fixated with Phillip Glass's the Hours, Yann Tiersen's Goodbye, Lenin!, and Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" from Bridge Over Troubled Water. For some reason the following words seem to be imprinted on my brain:

In the clearing stands a boxer,
And a fighter by his trade
Of every glove that laid him down
And cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
"I am leaving, I am leaving."
But the fighter still remains...

And for your enjoyment, the complete lyrics of "The Boxer" (because it is such an awesome song, even though I have no idea what that gunshot sound thing is in the background):
( Read more... )

I discovered my old CD's and played them while working on stuff and cleaning up my room for my grand uncle and grand aunt from New Jersey who are coming on Wednesday. They'll be taking over my room, and I'll be relegated to sleeping on the floor again. I managed to finish The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the original one, not the entire series) in about two hours and some odd minutes, and I just finished filling out the TA form. It's kind of a retro afternoon for me, and I'm afraid that I'm going to become terribly sentimental. Strange to hear what I used to love--this time, I actually understand why. And I do still like it. It's catchy and rather Euro techno club scene in terms of the background stuff, though some of the female vocals could definitely use some work. It's scary to think that the group members were all fifteen or sixteen when their album. They have a lot of potential in the catchy bubblegum Europop techno, but come to think of it, their next album was a little disappointing. I still can't tell Sara from Marie, but I'm randomly guessing that Marie is the one doing the main vocals. It's kind've (how does one spell that, anyway?) hard to tell. Eck, but why didn't they put "Knowing You, Knowing Me" on there? Or "Waterloo"? How very annoying.

My grandmother does not like Weird Al, needless to say. But he's bloody brilliant with his song parodies. Adore "Polka Power" from the "Running with Scissors" album. And I know exactly what they're talking about in "It's All About the Pentiums." Now all I have to do is find that Arrogant Worms song, "Horizon." It's damnably funny. But you really can't beat "Twenty Naked Pentcoastals in a Pontiac." Car Talk, how I adore thee.

You know, I used to really believe that the only thing I had good taste in was music. Sadly enough, I still think that's true.

I keep searching for things and finding them, things that I wasn't necessarily looking for in the first place but have found anyway. I'm starting to throw a lot more of my stuff out, thanks to mum. It's good for me, getting rid of junk, but it's always struck me that mum must throw away more things than most people or donate them. Then there's the problem of looking for things that aren't there anymore, like everything that I had from elementary school that wasn't a stuffed animal. Never mind; all of my stuffed animals besides my teddy bear were given away willingly, and all of them are from middle school and up. Change is good because it keeps us from getting into ruts, I suppose. I want to be young and act like a teenager but I also want to see what university is like. I still don't know what I'm doing in my future, and I feel terribly unprepared for it. Nobody is really big on my going to Quebec, which is sad because I really would like to go there. Britain is a lot more acceptable, but I'm sure once that possibility is out long enough everyone will try to steer me away from it. This is also assuming that I actually end up getting into any university at all other than DeVry. And I'm probably too stupid to go there anyway, and I'm sure that the tuition will be bloody hell. It has occured to me that nobody really wants me to be happy at university, just go there, dowell, and get a diploma + job. Maybe that's why I'm expected to go to Berkley. Take a chance on me. If you change your mind, I'm the first in line...

I'll stop sticking lyrics in the middle of my entry. Nobody ever really takes a chance on me though, unless they aren't American and are male. Erp, that sounds rather weird. My secret double lives are starting to catch up to me.

I was looking over my old camp address/e-mail/phone number roster, and I can't really let myself let go from it metaphorically. Interestingly enough David actually lives somewhat close. Funny to mention him; other than Esther, he was closest to Cathy at camp. He won't remember me, I'm sure. Some of the others might, and I still talk to some of them including Ann, my first real roommate. And then it struck me that I still really miss Cathy. I keep thinking that someday she's going to come back from Hong Kong and visit soon. She would've been a senior this year, and I just know that she would've come out here to visit Stanford and maybe even go to university there. She's never going to come back, but I can't repress what I want. After so many months it really should've gotten firmly imprinted into my brain that she's dead, but it hasn't exactly. Dormant thoughts ought to stay repressed, but unfortunately my brain tends to unrepress things pretty quickly. But I'll stop talking like I know about Freud.

It has occured to me that I still haven't told my parents anything about this, and at this rate I'm not sure if I ever will.

Where is Elena when I need her?

Screaming is absolutely lovely. Somehow it's very theraputic to attempt to murder one's vocal cords and make the loudest noise possible. It's even more satisfying when you're in a basement locked in a small stuffy office that has a stupidly placed window on the inside. Of course, there are people making arts and crafts and assembling puzzles in the basement as well. Jolly fun.

So after having a really lovely time TAing the seventh grade French class (and I'm not being sarcastic) I decided to take a quick peek at the War Office. Officially it's called the Counterpoint office. The Clam had managed to do some work during the free period: she edited and placed an entire article and did the community service calendar (pasting is so much work). Thing seemed to be going pretty well as all she told me to do was the world news column, which is pretty much copying good headlines off BBC and Yahoo!News. Then I had to go to class, and everything was just fine. Sophia and I met with the paper's faculty advisors to discuss the Clam situation. Alas, Caitlin wasn't able to come since she was sick at home with a fever of 103. Oy vey, I hope she feels better soon. Anyway, I'm supposed to schedule a meeting w/ the Clam to discuss the newspaper next Tuesday with the faculty advisors questioning us. Joy. At least they now know that we're being subjugated as slave labor without pay or even the possibility of becoming next year's editors. I know that Caitlin has been dreaming about her resignation for weeks, and I've been mentally drafting my resignation letter for at least two months now. Now that our imaginary budget has suddenly become real, distribution should be easier because we can finally print from our own stupid printer. It took the Dean of Students that long. Well, at least it's something.

I had a nasty surprise after school when I left my last class of the day to realize that Caitlin hadn't done her section because she was sick. My first instinct was to start screaming in the hallway, but I didn't want to disturb the 6th grade Spanish class which is quite close by. So I somewhat calmly packed up, ranted to Kerstin, Sophia, Julie, and Becca because they were near by, and Kerstin and I decided to have a merry screaming fest in the War Office just for fun. For some reason we kept on hysterically laughing uncontrollably while walking down to the basement in anticipation of the scream fest.

Upon entering the office, I felt like shredding up something because I saw two post it notes left on the computer that had to be written in the Clam's handwriting. She had to leave because she had a bad headache as a result of reading a truly horrendous article to be published this week and told me to finish up the rest of the paper. Well, at least I didn't have to worry about the front page photo. Not like that helped very much anyway. Kerstin and I screamed for about five seconds and couldn't stop laughing for the next five minutes. And no one outside seemed to notice. So a few minutes after we managed to regain our breath we screamed for ten seconds. Two people immediately stared at the office through the window, one of them being Joyce, a staff writer. We laughed even harder. Somehow everything felt absolutely hysterically my-stomach-is-aching kind of funny, even more so than a Pink Panther movie. Kerstin was very nice and stayed with me in the office until we both had to leave and did Caitlin's quiz thing on British history dates as we brainstormed together as I attempted to edit the "crappy" article that gave Canny a headache. It was bloody hell trying to keep all of the relevent stuff while not being hyperbolically cheerful. Then I had to do some minor reformatting of articles and captions and finding a word of the week and put in Kerstin's quiz, which had some lovely formatting issues. Sterling came down to see if I was done and hung around for a little bit before Seana came down. Argh. I feel bad about keeping them waiting for fifteen minutes.

So now I'm still sort of screwed because we need to do something with Caitlin's movie review space. Luckily I thought of what seems like a vaguely brilliant idea (thank god it's not another disgusting, horrific, pathetic attempt at a political satire) and hopefully will have about half an hour to do that tomorrow. Oish. I feel vaguely like murdering the Clam (just mentally, though; I'm not really the killing type) except the only reason why I'm feeling forgiving at the moment is because she looks somewhat like Cathy. It's strange that way. And her voice is rather similar to Cathy's. God forbid I begin mixing the two up.

Part of me still thinks that I'm making up her death.