Inner Musings

Saturday, June 22, 2002

Anemone Ra 11:02 AM

Tuesday, April 30, 2002

It's hard for me to find the time to write anymore. Mainly I'll just work myself into a frenzy, trying to get school work done, get house work done, make my parents happy, and wonder why it seems like all the time I do have to myself gets wasted as I lie on the floor, staring at the ceiling. Inevitably, I'll fall into a spurt of productivity where I just lay it all down to paper and then not look at it for weeks on end until I get another spurt during which I reread and edit my incoherent ramblings. Generally, I like to write a lot on vacations because the different venues tend to inspire creative productions that aren't necessarily so damned similar to all the stuff I write in Seattle. Anyhow.

The time crunch is a problem, especially the last quarter of my senior year. And lately, my creative inclinations have been popping up during class, not so much because a brilliant idea has struck me like burning, but mainly just because I've been in the same school system for thirteen years, and someone has told me that soon, yes, soon I'll be getting out of it. Of course, I'm starting to experience that frantic, nihilistic nostalgia that makes me certain I'll miss all the shitheads whom I never really liked, and wouldn't it have been nice if we could have gotten to know each other better over the last four years?

And aside from all these feelings of anxiety, there's a pervading je ne sais quois of tedium, boredom, and malaise, not just with the doldrums of public high school, but also with my family life. I'm really irritable around my family, which makes me feel worse because they're the people I actually care about. And by the time I'm through dealing with the bullshit that the school day has managed to serve me on a golden platter, it's so hard to be compassionate. And I don't want to take my family for granted. My mother and I have been stepping on each other's toes a lot lately; we're both too sensitive and martyrous to adequately balance each other out. My father and I just clash a lot. He wants one thing, I want another. Namely, my independence, which both my parents insist they're trying to help me achieve (through "responsibility") but I think they may have forgotten to force themselves to relax and trust me.

My neighbor Matthew said to me, "You know, you've been an adult for a long time. It's just that nobody will let you be one." I agreed wholeheartedly, glad that all this confusion and apprehension isn't just hormone imbalances fizzling out the circuits in my brain. I've been working for Matthew for about two months now, cleaning house and running errands. He came into vast wealth at an early age but is still sharp and quite worldly; we get along well. Unfortunately, he's 31 and I'm still 17, not old enough to be comfortably out of range, but definitely not young enough to be in range. And to me, sometimes age is just a number, especially where he's concerned. I'm probably just trying to complicate things because it's what I do, and life's been a little slow for me. And at the same time, who really knows. Who really fucking knows. All I know is that I feel like Lolita, and I�m neither 13 nor dependent.

I've completed another phase of friends. This time, I fell in with the "bad" crowd, complete with hotel parties, underage drinking, general malaise. I haven't hung out with any of them in some time, or any of my old friends for that matter, and don't really know what to do with myself at this point.

This summer, I want to have a couple of months to enjoy my youth while I've still got it. I want the smell of chlorine and sunscreen, and I want grass stains on the butt of my pants and I want fights with the garden hose.

My age right now is somewhat of a curse. I�m 17; the only perk of this age is being able to watch rated R movies, which everyone does from the age of 12 or so anyways. I can�t vote, can�t buy cigars, can�t go into porno shops (oh. no.) can�t go dancing, can�t write myself late notes to class�actually, I�m not legally �responsible� for my actions (financially, anyways) which is nice, but it�s not like I�m wracking up huge criminal deaths as it is. And who the fuck decides that a day before your birthday, you are mentally deranged and incapable of purchasing pornography (oxy moron?) but the day after is perfectly fine. Status crimes, I believe they�re called. And let�s not even get into the 21 year old thing. How the fuck are you a major (or whatever they call you��legal citizen�) but unable to buy beer and prosecuted as a minor (with major consequences) if caught with a bit of alcohol? The American legal system is beyond me. No one person will take complete credit for the way it is precisely at this moment, and if they did, I�m sure they�re clinically insane.

I finally managed to clean my room and arrange it in a manner that I find quite pleasing. It�s taken me ten odd years to do this, but I�ve come a long way, baby.

Far as big future plans go, I�m holding my breath in�breathless anticipation. Come September, I�ll be shuttling off (an hour�s drive away from home, thankyouverymuch) to college where I�ll pursue a mind-expanding experience, hopefully meet Epiphany, experience God, or find my soulmate. In lieu of this, I hope to get an adequate education. It�s been a bit piecey these last few years.

In spite of all this psuedo-political rage, I�m still wandering around in a wide-eyed fashion, dazedly eyeballing my breakfast toast and hysterically trying to recall people�s names as I stare them in the face. It�s very �twilight zone�, really. I think my brain may have short-circuited somewhere in the quiet section towards the back, where you don�t notice the little snag until BOOM suddenly everything just starts falling apart�

Anemone Ra 9:05 PM

Monday, April 15, 2002

Ah yes. Back to the story. So, on Valentine's day, we were supposed to hang out, you know, what with us being together and what not. I got in a fight with my parents, so nothing happened. The next day, we decided. I paged him, but he never called back, and I didn't hear from him for two days. No, three. It was ridiculous. I was PISSED. So, I finally hear from him, and I let him know how angry I was. He was starting to wheel me back in, when I started talking to our mutual friend Carlos. It seems that he'd asked Carlos to lie for him. I lost it then, and told him that I didn't want to date him anymore. I tried to be his friend for the longest time, two or three months. He never gave up on the idea that we'd be together, couldn't understand why I didn't want to be with him. And it started not only being about what he had did, but how he reacted when things ended: not very well at all. It didn't seem as though he could respect my reasons or even remotely understand where I was coming from.

Then, one night I was hanging out with Lisa and her boyfriend Lee at Lee's house, where there was a party. I met Kennen, who was hot beyond belief, and I started talking to him. Eventually, I got very tipsy, and we hoooked up. Zac came by and saw me sitting with him.

The next night, my tires were slashed and my stereo was stolen; Michael and Zac were picked up in a stolen car with eight stereos in the backseat.

Anemone Ra 10:48 AM

Thursday, February 21, 2002

I met Zac at a party, probably two days after the New Year. It was 2002, and I wanted to unwind. We were at the Ramada, and through my acquaintance with Andrew, our two parties conjoined. Zac wandered in and out of the room, socializing as his nature demanded, and came back several times to where I was playing cards, and sat on my feet. I remember what I was wearing; a pair of gray shorts from the University of New Orleans and a raspberry-colored tank top that I ganked from my sister. Chloe had been eyeballing Andrew (�since sophomore year�) so I thought we could accept their invitation to sleep back in the other room without unsolicited weirdness. I ended up sleeping in Zac�s arms as we watched Castaway. Tom Hanks cut his rotting tooth out with the blade of an ice skate as Zac�s hands flattened across my back, pressed me closer. �Can I kiss you?� he said. I smiled and buried my head in his chest.

I left the next morning to go to church, and hoped that I would run into him later, get his number from my friend Lupe, something. Eventually I did, in the Albertson�s parking lot with Chloe and Kathrine, just before we went to Club Dakota�s, and danced amid sweaty awkward teens. I gave him my pager number and he said he�d call later that night. We went dancing, and afterwards, stripped off our pants and dangled our legs out the car window. This attracted the attention of a car full of well-intentioned but slightly strange military boys rolling next to us, and we shivered together down at the Cove as Chloe burned coloring books from the backseat of her car. I met up with Zac later that night, and ended up traveling down to Port Orchard with him, Felix, Jonathon, and Michael. I spent the day out there, from the time we got there to about seven in the morning, we stayed awake, talking, eating. Once the sun rose, Michael and Mike had left and Felix was on his bed with his girlfriend. Zac and I slipped under the sheets and blankets of the rickety couch, and afterwards I watched four hours of the �Real World� as he slept, my own body refusing sleep.

He turned out to be five years older than me, the largest gap I�ve spanned yet. We were both surprised; I thought him to be maybe 19, and he thought I was at least twenty. He promised to go to the party that Chloe and I were throwing that weekend.

Over the next few weeks, the haze of love drifted up around my eyes and I followed him around, drunk with feelings that were uneasily familiar and portended tragedy in the end, swords and poisons, but I shoved that part back and concentrated on the soft-focus mood-lit moments that were not extinguished but instead amplified when he trusted me with the details of his past; his dealings in drugs and the felony conviction, the jail time, his ex-fianc�, the car-stealing�a lot. Big load for a little seventeen-year-old. It didn�t register, and I overlooked it romantically. Eventually I was doing a lot for him, sneaking him into the house at night because he didn�t have a place to stay or a job, and couldn�t have held down either of them since he was still in court dates up to his ears. He was never caught outright, but we ran into a couple sticky situations that required fast thinking and fast talking. From the very beginning, we marveled at how much we had in common, how well we got along.

My parents were concerned with my �new life;� how I�d started to hang out with Lupe and Chloe constantly, how late I was out, especially on school nights. I didn�t see much of Moon anymore, but then again, she�d been wrapped up in her own involvements, namely those by the name of Julius.

And then, everything started unraveling.

Anemone Ra 11:13 AM

Thursday, January 03, 2002

Blog blog bloggedy blog.

Been a while.

Here I am, ushering in the New Year with all the enthusiasm of a drooly 1-year-old. Glaze-eyed and the like, I'm a bit out of it. I missed my wrestling meet today because the car died on 1st avenue. Currently, I'm waiting to be picked up by Oasis and Jimmy Whistler. It's Jimmy's 21st B-day, and we're going...bowling. Yee-haw! I've got a fat list of resolutions. I must adhere to them by avoiding all the fetid finger-foods in the Whistler residence. Oasis is semi-involved with the Swiss exchange student, Maryse, who also happens to be the newest addition to our wrestling team. I'm generally her partner, as far as gender lines fall, and all the boys seem to find this particularly scintillating. I swear, we could be the fattest, greasiest, most foul-smelling women, and someone somewhere would get off on the fact that we were wrestling with each other.

I went downtown today with my Mormon friend Jestin today. Since he's not 18 yet, we had to bring along a chaperone. It wasn't so bad, but I think we'd be a lot closer if we were ever allowed to be alone. Sometimes I'm convinced that I like him, and other days, it seems like the effort is too extraneous. Granted, he turns 18 in a month and a half, but still. Will we be compatible? He's not really a deviant, which seems to be something I require in my sexual conquests.

Over and out.

Anemone Ra 11:29 PM