Straight No Chaser

Quiescence

refreshing, because if i'd been the one to finish, we'd have wound up in a rowhouse somewhere in the midwest, raising island girl and her seven serendipitous siblings. lots of sex and not much substance.

fitting, also, because being in atlanta for too long always makes me feel imaginary. today was supposed to be a hard day. i started a journal entry last night, the third of three; it eventually got deleted but it was going to say, "i think tomorrow is going to be a very hard day." of course, at four o'clock in the morning i was still just freaking out over whether or not marcus was going to call, but still, between two shifts at work and three heinously boring classes and an extraneous stupid meeting, it should have been a hard day.

and it would have, but i didn't even wake up till almost two in the afternoon, having completely bypassed two classes, one shift and the first half of the meeting. i don't feel too bad about it; i convinced myself all the sleep was my body trying to help the antibiotics along, rather than just me being incredibly lazy. and i didn't want to go to class or work or the meeting, anyway. but still, it seems weird: i totally fucked myself, by staying up all night and sleeping all day, and then all it took was a couple phone calls and an apologetic email to circumvent every likely repercussion. it should have been harder than that. i should still be atoning, now. evidently, nobody cares whether i show up, so why do i?

sigh. pardon that tedious recounting of my stupid day.

"the sisterhood of the traveling pants" was just released to video. cute, very warming movie; ya-ya for the younger set. i went to philadelphia and saw it with my little cousin. sistery-type bonding for two sisterless girls on opposite ends of adolescence. the whole bridget-losing-her-virginity thing confused her tremendously, because the screenwriters' way of being subtle about that was to keep referring to it as "her first time." so then, of course, rachel asked about a million times, and loudly, what that meant, and i couldn't explain it satisfactorily in a theater-whisper, so by the end she thought the jockish blond boy had to come help bridget out with her first period. an obvious conclusion, because at eleven, she can't think about anything but periods. how incompletely she understands their purpose, how terrified she is to get one, and how it better hurry up so her b.f.f. bari will stop calling her the "bloodless baby." even if rachel completely missed the point of that plotline, it was a nice bonding experience for us. preteendom really doesn't change much at all, from decade to decade.

and also, there was that other nice parallel that we couldn't talk about but that i noticed, because i did understand about bridget, and for every one of rachel's ill-informed menstruation worries, i've got three or four similar ones about that. most of them beyond just the typical is it going to hurt, because i don't care, and i've got a good sense of that anyway. i'm not even really worried that we're going to, even though everyone else is sure we will, because our collective resolve is impermeable. well. really, it's more like...chances are, one of us loses it, the other holds onto his/her willpower. in any given scenario. but it works. we're smart. we take advantage of the alternatives, we push the envelope a lot, everybody stays happy and nobody gets pregnant.

so why even bring it up? really, shannon. we're probably the world's biggest hypocrites, anyway. because nobody ever drew the line between just the tip and too much. no one says this is harmless, that's cheating. we wing it. and we're not so much smart as we are incredibly stupid, so it's more like, we wrong it. (get it????)

miserable day, easy as it was. my mom called me a crybaby, earlier, on the phone. but also, she says i probably have tonsillitis, which is insightful and a relief. so net value was positive; thanks mom.

i want a new journal. i've still got more than three hundred entries to go with this one, but i'm getting restless. tired of the words "straight no chaser," because as clever as they seemed at the beginning, now they are just trite. i've got the new title all picked out, and an idea for the first entry. i'm obsessively paranoid about overshooting my memory limit on this bitch. i want not to have to click from page to page to find the links i'm looking for, and i want not to feel like a stupid novice. i want to shed all five of my journaling sins. and i want to be like ernie: one distinct, well-developed concept per entry. no mas rambling. capital letters, maybe.

if i am a figment of someone's imagination--which doesn't seem entirely unlikely, because i've wondered about that before, like back in high school--and if that someone is you, then seriously, do better. try harder. give me a white-girl nose and more manageable hair, a kinder spirit and the patience to complete any task i set out to complete. help me not hate my stupid friends, please, and make me slightly less common-sensically retarded. even better, just imagine me on keiki. and i want lots of babies. no stretchmarks.

more in a moment.