today our dear six year old monster was brain storming on birthday presents for a friend. Laquina told him his friend liked the ocean. Monster said, "I can't get him the ocean."

chinatown

I saw a lot of snowy mountains last night.

Ender and I had a friend (C.) from far away staying at a little mountain resort town very near.
Remember this?

Yeah, well, there's another one.
Ender and I took my roommate's classy vehicle and I wove us through the twisty roaded vista. I can report that I did well, I made sure not to park by any Porsches just to be safe and I am now considering a career as a shuttle driver. Because when C. and his friend M. (if you don't want my blog to turn into an alphabet you should start picking pseudonyms for yourself) went to see a movie for ninety minutes, Ender and I got bored with trying to find free parking and just drove around. We listed the movie stars we thought it would be fun to see. Cate Blanchett, Uma Thurman, Bill Murray, Zooey Deschanel...

tempt me

The bakery.

Can be boring because all I do is sweep but I love the customers. Sometimes they tell me all about their lives when I don't even prompt them.

Today a middle aged woman came in and got a donut and a soda. "I really shouldn't be doing this but I'm just so stressed. Do other students feel this way?"
"Oh yes, yes, we all feel that way."
"Oh good, I'm glad I'm not the only one. I just was having such a stressful day and I called my son to see if I could stop by and get a hug but he said he was at school, we go to different colleges you know, and so I came here. To have a treat."
"Well, sometimes a treat just does the trick."

"Hables español ?" another woman asked me.
"Uhhhhhhh...uno poquito."
We tried to sort out the bus schedule together. I knew how to say le auto bus because that's something you say to a five year old who's kind of bi-lingual but everything else was all fuzzy and frenchy. I should work on that.

"I shouldn't be getting all these donuts and cookies," said one man, "this could be bad for my health."
"Oh no, these are all very good for you!" I said confidently, "These are full of vitamins!"
He looked me in the eyes for a second and said, "You are very good at lying."
"Thank you."

Someone else tried to tell me about a donut boiled in dulce de leche called a queen's arm. His wife kept telling him I didn't know what he was talking about. It's true, I kind of didn't. He also told me that he can eat lots of sweets and then eat some celery or lechuga before he tests his blood sugar and the celery fixes everything! Makes it go waaaaayyyyy down. He assured me that he's tested his own blood long enough to know what's going on. I told him to enjoy his lechuga.

la terra trema

because I've learned that leaving angsty essays on the table sometimes helps.

You've caught on, I'm sure, but I'd like to bring it up again.

I love the wind.

Tonight as I left my class I walked into a world of roaring wind. I sat down on a retaining wall to enjoy a few minutes of the gusty buffetings. My hair was curly when I stepped out but I'm not so sure it's curly now. I thoroughly enjoyed the cold night air.

There have been a lot of things on my mind lately which I don't really want to talk about yet.
Do you ever feel the institutional weight of your religion? Do you ever wish your worship services were conducted outside in the world God created instead of in stuffy or even luxuriously decorated buildings?
Sometimes I wish we sang hymns at the top of our lungs, that we were really singing our hearts out instead of trying to sound nice all the time.

I hate nice.

There are dualities here. On one hand, the older I get, the more I study God and the scriptures and the more I find the doctrines expounded there to be true and everlasting. On the other hand, the older I get, the amount of troubled I can get deepens.

Not that I hate these troubles. I'd have no reason to believe in anything without my questions. The Byrds taught me to everything there is a season. Turn.

Turn.

Turn.

I'll turn as many times as it takes to find truth.

wishes

I don't want a car, I want a dinosaur.

There should be friendly dinosaurs that roam the earth. Tomorrow I would walk out back, untie my brontosaurus and ride over to your house. How long would traveling a few hundreds of miles on dinosaur back take?

Maybe I'd be bold and have a pterodactyl to fly over long distances. Keep the brontosaurus for trips to the grocery store.

Do you have pterodactyl landing at your house?

every batch from scratch paper rock scissors

Working at a bakery is rather enjoyable (from all two days of my experience). There's the setting out of food (I'm not one of the bakers that has to come in at some wee hour for which I am mostly grateful) and the enjoying of customers. Everyone is pleased to be at a bakery.

On my first day as evening was falling a young boy, a scrawny seven year old, came in to ask if there was any work he could do. Apparently there are some neighbor boys who have figured out they can do little tasks for us to get a doughnut for free. It's a terribly charming business model they have going on. Sometimes I imagine them twenty years down the road telling someone, "Yeah, when I was seven we lived near a bakery. I'd go there once a week and help the owner take out the trash just so I could get a bear claw for free. That was a great thing, to be young then."

On my second day, toooday, I was smiling as I straightened out the trays of muffin tops and coconut macaroons when I happened to glance out the window and see a twenty-something fellow walking past. I smiled at him and he came into the bakery. He ordered a buttermilk bar and some sourdough bread. I couldn't resist baiting him into a little chat, "You'll have to tell me how the sourdough is, I haven't tried it yet."
"Well, I plan on coming here more often."
I think he was a little shy. He seemed a little stumbly at his half of the quotidian interchange.
I told him to have a good day and he started walking away a little backwards-ish and saying something.
I pointed out that he was forgetting his debit card on the counter.
When he left I kept smiling.

Who wouldn't? It's a great job so far.

no bjork left behind

Part of me wants to support compliments on my intellect. You know, invite them and then roll around in them as if I was in one of those plexiglass chambers where you're covered in honey and dollar bills are blowing around as you try to grab as many as you can. But (1) I have a strong aversion to game show reminiscent things like hordes of people, men with orange tan skin, and fake audience applause, and (2) I am afraid I'm actually perpetuating an Ellsworth Toohey society of mediocrity by trumpeting my habit of abstruse communication all over the internet. Speaking of which, the two fictional characters from literature I think about the most are Toohey and Miss Havisham. That might say something about me.

Back to my intellect, I was raised by a professor and a teacher/librarian. My close relatives are all professors and teachers. My sister is getting her masters and teaching art. I was certain from early childhood that I would get a doctorate. In fact, I had dreams of being one of those people with multiple doctorates from multiple countries. Maybe I have senioritis, or more appropriately, super-senioritis, but I feel like I'm the apple leaping from the tree. Sometimes when I sit in classes that aren't film classes I imagine poking my eyeballs out with a fork and about how I could teach myself the same stuff from a book without having to sit in restrictive classrooms and jumping through hoops. Then I look back on my ancestry steeped in degrees (like tea but with glasses and theses) and I wonder how I could turn into such a snot-nosed kid who doesn't know what's good for her. I wasn't raised to be the bored, unengaged student in the corner! Why am I the thing that's not like the others? Then I want to poke my eyeballs out even more.

The earth may shatter after I type this, but my interest in intellectual pursuits is waning and my support of trade schools is growing. Rapidly. I don't know what this means.

help!
. . . _ _ _ . . .

crisis v. normality

To answer a question that someone asked me two years ago: No.

To tell you the question that someone asked me two years ago: "Do you think you're different from other people?"

(You can imagine I felt uncomfortable)

No, I do not. Again, I say NO.

I actually feel pretty natural, pretty average, pretty normal. I am, of course, a product of my life and that seems natural to me.

I wonder what you were thinking when you asked the question. Well, I'm pretty satisfied with my answer now.

zero titles

YAKETY YAK


--------=-__+$&^%________-----_-don't come back.

Ha. ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhssssssooooo as well today I saw a hair net in a tree. and then i started wondering what a tree full of hair nets would look like. and then what a tree with a tree sized hair net would look like. no hornets in the hair net tree, that's fo sho.

Sometimes, the gibberish is just so much better. let's be honesto, california.

i've got to me couche*, though, because I'ma get me a job, a metier, tomorrow. la dee da bran muffins.



*lay me down to sleep. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

obama and his glasses

I have a life-size Obama at my desk. EB's brother got him as a white elephant and EB stole him away and gave me the lovely present. I laughed and clapped with glee when I saw him and now everytime I walk in the study I jump because I think there's a lurker. Well, there is. It's just a cardboard president lurker.

The best kind.

I walked around looking for a job today and almost got conned into ordering the local paper. Again. It's been a long time since I've looked for a job. In fact, I've only looked once. Last year people were offering me jobs all the time. I had to turn jobs down.

I wish that by opening your arms wide and giving your world a tight enough squeeze you could smooth everything into place. You would not feel guilty or half-ended or like half-of-a-friend or like the inconsiderate-sister because you squeezed ever so tightly and that effused love which makes everything all right. You wouldn't be wide-awaked thinking about time flying. How you age and your parents age and someday you go to the grocery store with grandma white hair and everyone treats you differently. You wouldn't be thinking about all the kind things you should be doing and how no one will know how special they are and how it's long past due that you registered your bicycle with the police and if it gets stolen you deserve it and your life will end.

[gaskhdf]
which means: [siiiiighhhh]

Maybe, since you can't do that, you could have some tortilla soup and imagine what it would be like if you could see all the stars in the sky and some extra ones, too. Imagine if there were so many extra stars it could rain stars and they would make shish and ahhh like the light shooting out of the Beast's fingers in the Disney cartoon. And they would bounce off the ground just a little ways like marshmellows do.

Or, option two: Maybe you could fly away to Greece and float in the Mediterranean Sea and have sun-warmed face. Oh yes! Then when you dried off you could walk around in your sun dress and dance with all the locals. Yokels.

GAREEECE!!!!!

Love,
Marge