brought to you by the letter "I"

I want to go do fun stuff with people. (How's that for a specific, well thought out sentence?)

I have sore calf muscles, a new jar of Burts Bees' Almond Milk Beeswax Hand Creme (the hand creme of the gods, I tell you), and a stack of books (some owned, some library borrowed) to read.

It is 2004. That is still really difficult for me to believe. It makes me want to hug my friends and hum cheesy, sentimental songs, but I refrain. At least, I refrain from humming.

It snowed more today. The tornado siren was going off awhile ago, but I don't think there's a storm warning. I'm not going into the bathroom with a pillow and a flashlight just yet. The siren's off now, and I didn't even bother turning on the radio while it was still going.

I'm just trying to see how many paragraphs I can start using the letter "I." It's not that difficult.

It's not often that I'm this bored. There's no good reason for being so bored, either. I should just get off the computer and on the phone. Sometimes I let hours slip by, completely oblivious. How does that work?

three quotations after dinner

Today I've been reading Let Nothing You Dismay, which is a fantastic, melancholy, funny, interesting (and appropriately Irish-related) book by Mark O'Donnell. I absolutely love it, and will probably stay up late finishing it after I get back from doing something-or-other with Molly and Kristen. I keep getting the terrible urge to highlight favorite passages, but alas, 'tis a library copy.


So, three quotations here:


"Margery nodded, seconding the motion. 'The woman's obtuse. Acutely obtuse, if that's geometrically possible.'"


"As the stores of all sorts and crowds of all stripes and looming clownish skyscrapers wheeled past again, made into phantasmic swirls by the darkness and the cab's speed, it occured to him, organizer of the universes that he was supposed to be, that the world was a beautiful full-color encyclopedia, only the entries were in random order and it was written in an indecipherable language."


"'Songs are easier than talking,' Les explained. 'They're already there.'"


(They may be slightly less magnificent when taken out of context, but still!)

other people

I cannot get over how great my friends are. Tonight on the way to Super Target, we drove past one of the hospitals and Kristen said, "Just think--somebody is probably dying in there right now." We were quiet for a moment, but then Molly added "But there's probably a baby being born, too." And there are probably lots of people who talk in this way, but sometimes there are moments when I'm just so happy to have the particular friends that I do, friends who see the death and life of the world and comment on it, simply, on the way to Super Target to look at sunglasses and purses and flip flops and to speak of shallow things like Friends on DVD and prom accessories. I have friends who are neither too humorous nor too serious, and whether it is rare or not, it feels precious.


After dropping Kristen off at her house, I was alone in the car and Belle & Sebastian's "Seeing Other People" came up on the mixtape (a CD, really, but I always think of it as a mixtape) and I was suddenly so exuberant and melancholy that I had to drive home in a roundabout way so I could hear the entire three minutes and forty seconds or so of the song without arriving home first. It's because it is already March and this overwhelms me. It's because I'm figuring out that while I may spend a long time wondering exactly what I should think about things, I usually know exactly what I feel about things and am often just too impatient to let it enter language-form.