harness the power of mitosis.

i'm apparently not the only one to notice the inordinate coldness in bowditch. what's going on with that?

it's not even quite may but i already feel like i've passed through the summer inaugural. yesterday, i mean. i went over to help christine study for ap european history (she'll do fine), and we ended up leaving her too-cold house on a nice, sunny day to go over to the playground at campbell. swingsets. flash cards. william of orange.

i got a sunburn, which is terrible, the first one of the season, oh, i am so very white.

now i'm back at school for two more weeks, give or take. classes end friday. friday. five more days, imagine that. the horrible, horrible philosophy paper is done, and that leaves me more or less open for the week so that i can enjoy the little time i still have here. then home. the tree outside my window there finally has some colour, but that's something to write about later.

yeah, now i have one too.

this house has a half-attic, or maybe you could call it a partial attic. it's only a fraction of one, anyway. i went up there for the first time in a while about an hour ago and had to chuckle to myself that i'd always wanted a room up there. we didn't use it for years but had to begin due to storage overflow fairly recently. the ceiling is low and only some parts of the floor can be walked on. patty was warning me, don't step on the insulation, you'll fall right through.

this momentarily terrified me, and the box i sought seemed so far out of reach across such a perilous divide that i just came back down. i'm thinking about it now, how the attic is directly above my room, and what would happen if it should ever fall. i've had questions in my mind about the structural integrity of the house ever since i was very young and i found out that my father (with some help) was actually the one that built it. the rooms are somewhat oddly shaped and there's a knocking noise inside the walls (probably just a normal house noise, as if i'd be able to tell) that used to keep me up at night with worry and some vague unrelated and wholly unfounded fear that people were coming for us, sneaking across the front lawn. it's always something.

anyway, to make a metaphor of the structural integrity thing, for both family and nation, my father came home from work shortly after the minor attic escapade and proceeded into his usual nativist fuckery, unloading on those "illegals" as he is wont to do.

seriously, a lot of your precious white people don't even know the national anthem in english.

fitting that the immigration topic was also discussed at length during world civ class today - there's really no escaping it. it's going to keep coming up. my father. i really can't stand the man sometimes. i didn't even want to argue with him this time, i just left.

i'm ashamed knowing that i was just like him only a few years ago. what the fuck, me? what the fuck?

i'm at home for the weekend...should probably be working on that philosophy paper, the one with two due dates. imagine that, it's due today, the 28th, but it'll be accepted monday with no penalty. i think only one person passed it in today, and no one else seems to have done much with it. and how could we? aristotle vs. confucius, but based on a modern issue. five pages. i have one. i am unenthusiastic. it'll get done, everything always does, but that doesn't mean it'll be good.

i'm supposed to go to christine's tomorrow and help her study for her ap european history test. that takes me back to last year, when i was taking it, and everything else that was happening then. friday evening alone at home with the mendoza line playing and memories of such a great past gone by...this is not the formula for happiness.

wiki:

"National Bolshevism seeks a merger between Russia and the rest of Europe in a union to be known as Eurasia [...] It is also highly traditionalist in the mould of Julius Evola. Economically the National Bolsheviks seek to marry the New Economic Policy of Vladimir Lenin to the Corporatism of Benito Mussolini. This marriage of Fascist capitalism with the capitalist portions of Lenin's dogma have caused many communists to reject this as a Fascist ideology..."

so, national bolshevism. bad idea, or the worst idea?

there are certain places from your past you just didn't appreciate at the time, but you can see yourself there now, aren't there?

maine, by the ocean, 1998. fifth grade. i had no idea, not the faintest conception, of the kind of innocence and wonder i had there in those days. we were there for a week, they called it "environmental camp," but in reality it was a sort of growing-up experience for us youngfolk and a look into the vistas of natural wonder in the area.

to be back there again, lying on the beach at night while we were told about the stars, me supplementing everyone's interest with snippets i'd learned out of all those astronomy books i used to borrow from the elementary school library. letting go, lying in a circle. kara and i running to the water - we weren't supposed to go in - and waiting for the small waves to come for us, running back like it was a race, or we were running for our lives. the tide pools, the literal rock band, the scary swamp area with the irregularly drawn numbers on awkward shacks which had seen better days, making fun of the principal, passing through areas with "no trespassing" signs and being told it was okay, andy with what must have seemed like the dirtiest forbidden jokes at the time.

in the hall of the mountain king. the minnesota timberwolves.

i argued with my fifth grade teacher about whether to capitalize the "i" in internet. she fell during the trip when we were walking along the road, incapacitated and incorrect. i thought i had fallen in love with some character from a book i had been reading each night with a flashlight, my earliest prototypical engine of sexual fantasy firing waveringly but on all cylinders.

on the last night, one of the counselors sang and played guitar for a few songs, scattered lines of which i remember. the girls cried, most of the boys splashed water on their faces to make fun of the girls. i don't remember what i did. probably nothing. i listened. tried to remember. a lot of it is gone now, and the journal we had to write i kept heavily censored, since the teacher would be reading them. i regret not keeping another one, but i doubt it would have any significance to me today, the memories are enough, or not enough, but all.

we learned how to set tables and i learned the word "queue." i ate kelp. my kite wouldn't fly. we whispered rumours about how bethany might be anorexic, barely knowing what we meant. i mostly just remember the ocean, though; kara and i once again, running as close as we dared to the forbidden water, then back. i think at one point my contemplative nature that began to reveal itself in later years made an early, unscheduled appearance. i must have stared out at the ocean, imagining my life ahead of me like so much of the sea and how i would never have that moment again.

actually quite useful. thanks, laura.

for posterity and claire:

Mr. Galloway Goes to Washington – George Galloway
Cakes and Ale – W. Somerset Maugham
I’m Not the Only One – George Galloway
The Washingtonienne – Jessica Cutler
Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse (trans. Joachim Neugroschel)
Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque – Joyce Carol Oates
Take the Cannoli: Stories From the New World – Sarah Vowell
Mistress Bradstreet – Charlotte Gordon
The Partly Cloudy Patriot – Sarah Vowell
Hegemony or Survival – Noam Chomsky
Number9Dream – David Mitchell
I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight – Margaret Cho
Orlando: A Biography – Virginia Woolf
Hotel World – Ali Smith
The First Crusade: A New History – Thomas Asbridge
The Chinese Bell Murders – Robert Van Gulik
The Whole Story and Other Stories – Ali Smith
The Devil in the White City – Erik Larson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
Off In Zimbabwe – Rod Kessler
Affinity – Sarah Waters
Ten Days That Shook the World – John Reed
The King in Yellow – Robert W. Chambers
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them – Al Franken
Waiting – Ha Jin
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
The Gnostic Gospels – Elaine Pagels
Dubliners – James Joyce
The Plague – Albert Camus
The Elegant Universe – Brian Greene
Red Azalea – Anchee Min
Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds, and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon’s Firefly – Jane Espenson, et al.
Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World’s Best Poems – Camille Paglia
The Proud Tower – Barbara W. Tuchman
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Wild Ginger – Anchee Min
The Favourite Game – Leonard Cohen
Beautiful Losers – Leonard Cohen
The Moon Under Her Feet – Clysta Kinstler
A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana – Haven Kimmel
On Beauty – Zadie Smith
The First Elizabeth – Carolly Erickson
Picture Bride – Cathy Song
The Dragon’s Village – Yuan-tsung Chen
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis
The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
I Am No One You Know: Stories – Joyce Carol Oates
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

a combination of a witch and a prostitute. i found this in my random thoughts notebook and i don't remember where it came from, but it feels like senior year. it wasn't one of mine. witchstitute sounds more like an academy for witches, perhaps. also, apparently a good name for a band would be "the myclonic jerks." that one definitely sounds like me. i think i came up with that.

during a conversation about careers and graduation, in reference to college graduates having to accept work they are overqualified for:

"why? why are you nannying? don't nanny!"

this was a week or two ago, but there isn't much time left, so there it is now.

jeremy came down to "the rooms" (being 313 and 312) yesterday and, in a delicious flourish of childishness and whimsy, showed us his specially modified nerf guns. men...we're such children when it comes down to it. consider greg earlier today, clutching his newly-purchased nerf dart revolver tightly, inches away from his replica lightsaber, saying "i'm not immature." the irony. truly, in some ways, i say this: fuck maturity.

so i threw down my eight dollars and i'll be getting one too, and next year we'll be shooting each other with suction cup-tipped darts and laughing hysterically, plotting revenge and escape routes, reloading, modding, and practicing our aiming skills, like highly sophisticated fourth-graders. college, eh?

crazy crazy world, crazy crazy times
crazy crazy world, crazy crazy times
hang up your chairs to better sweep
clear the floor to dance
shake the rug into the fireplace

crazy crazy world, crazy crazy times
crazy crazy world, crazy crazy times
hang up your chairs to better sweep
clear the floor to dance
sweep the floor into the fireplace

hang up your chairs to better sweep
clear the floor to dance
throw the chairs into the fireplace

hang up your chairs to better sweep
clear the floor to dance
throw the walls into the fireplace

-- r.e.m., "fireplace"