Odd

May day has come and passed and I've started thinking in romantic trysts. Like Brittani said last year, this is the time when I fall in love five times on the street. The hike to class leaves me lovestruck; boys with bright blue eyes and thick (almost brazen) dark hair are just too much for me.

I think about the tiniest slivers of past relationships. Its not that I miss them. I keep reminding myself I'm too busy anyway. There are just a few tiny things I wish I could splice into my life: the way a boy can spray the smallest mist of cologne on the nape of his neck and then turn to smile, the hint of a yawn over the phone or even the tiny shred of remorse behind a vindictive screaming match.

These are cathartic. They numb me totally, subtle and sexy and oh so frank.

Bloomingdale's

I started work at Bloomingdale's last Monday. I showed up an hour early feeling grey, I think because of the weather. That's what I chose to blame, at least. I think I can maybe explain the feeling a little better now because I have distanced myself from it and perhaps have a little perspective to diffuse the angst.

I think the best way to describe the way a felt was like this: It felt like the constant, infinite shuffling of men and women and children was this pixelated portrait from the earliest photographers. We were all black and white. We were working slowly to build a railroad or maybe we were standing outside of a pub for some reason. We were all wearing bowler hats and growing out mustaches and we were all grey and black. It became hard to distinguish myself from others around me and it because hard to distinguish myself from the speckled floors and it became hard to distinguish myself from the hipsters in Urban Outfitters and the soccer moms with strollers in J. Jill.

They are going to start screening kids for depression.

I can't watch the news like I did today. It makes me feel like never getting out of bed.

In the mall, we all started looking the same and it started to actually hurt. I couldn't leave. I wandered in and out of every shoe store in the mall, and I couldn't find a single one that didn't make me feel horrible. Aldo, depressing. Stacato, horrible. I can't even start on DSW. I even went to shoe sections in different department stores.

Watching the scramble to find the right shoes when no one really allowed in malls even needs shoes. You have to have shoes to enter, so going to a mall to find shoes sounded more and more absurd, like sitting in a grounded canoe and fishing into the grass.

I'm tired.

Da Kine; Things

There and days and there are times and there are poems that make me do things like this. Talk like this, fragmented, thinking like the string theory and forever interconnecting myself with myself. The times like this are the moments before sunset when the sun is still alive in its fervor, still in domination of the daytime sky, still exalted Helios. However, the sun begins its descent behind buildings; it is hidden, but its power still reigns (like aristocrats in agrarian times). The sky is still triumphantly blue, signaling daytime and time continuum, but where is the instigator of the light? I can not continue like this and I can not halt.

Anyhow, here is an excerpt of a poem that puts me in such, the cyclical form of rumination and regurgitation:

Da kine for me is the moment when
things extend beyond you and me
and into the rest of the world. It is
the thing.

Like two who love each other
breaking eye contact and coming
out of that love and back into the
conversation.

On Snow.

It’s snowing in Rochester.

I’m struggling with the cliché idea snowflakes have been endowed with. Surely, I can believe that no two people are alike, the sheer idea that any of our magnanimous atomic structures being aligned in the same manner over the spread of, let’s say, the 20 billion people that have been alive. You and I are surely not the same, though it oft seems we’ve fallen from the same tree of life, just on separate continents to separate mothers.

It seems like snowflakes, though, could very possibly have an identical twin floating somewhere in the atmosphere. In a single storm, perhaps trillions of snowflakes fall. If we take into account the relatively few atoms in each snowflake, it seems nearly impossible that the atmosphere has never (by accident of course, atmospheres have a reputation to protect) created two crystals that are, if not exactly identical, so strikingly similar that it would be hopeless to name them and try to remember which is which should they be scattered among their relatives. I mean, the weather is practically begging for a Mary-Kate and Ashley style switcheroo film. Worse still, would be to name these snowflakes similar sounding names like Ayumi and Tetsumi, should they be Japanese, for example. We can’t assume all snowflakes American, now can we? Some may very well be immigrants from other continents, traveling across vast oceans, morphing into raindrops and waves and perhaps specially bottled water from the French Alps.

I would much prefer to believe that no two snowstorms are alike, since, from where you stand, you can never take in the full expanse of shivering people and scuttling cars. All you can see is what you see... and that is often far different from what you actually see, all snow personification aside.

Americano with Skim

I need to do this thing. In fact, I’m doing it write now. Document the moments when I feel content, woven into myself with just the right amount of espresso threads, like a giant, pro-active rug (which I realize makes almost no sense as a metaphor). That way, when I look back on my youth, I won’t be able to fool myself into believing that I was a constant outpouring of angst.

Sure, I hang on every word Elizabeth Wurtzel pours out, copious stories of broken families and lithium and ecstasy trips.

But not today. Today, I am sunny and wonderful and listening to Devendra Banhart and taking photographs for the new identification that will live in my wallet. Today, I am May in January.

Friday, 01/02/08

Written on the 2nd. It sees trite now, but it's been sitting on my work computer all weekend. It would seem a tragedy to not give let it see some light...

Fridays are always dead here in Stabile. Aside from a few footsteps around the cryostat and surgical rooms, the only sound I can distinguish from the whir of the thirteen abandoned computers around me is the shuffling of paper a few cubicles away and my constant click-clacking of keys A through Z.

Today, I bought a faux leather jacket I’ve had my eyes on at Macy’s, but I still want and want. I’m the ideal American in some respects, fueled by the need to constantly purchase and consume. You can bet that if there were more like me, the markets would never take a dip, I suppose no one would have a 401k, either. So, the markets give and take.

Meandering around the mall on the first day of two thousand and nine, and I’m suddenly suffocated by the meaningless scurrying and frustrated glance of its inhabitants, and I can’t find a way to stop myself from wanted things, and my tastes are ever-more expensive. I want a graphite damier louis vuitton planner with spiral binding and horrendously silver dog tags by david yurman.

I want a job at loring pasta bar like patrick had, even though I’ve never even met patrick, to walk away from a few hours of work with a few hundred dollars. I want to meander back and forth down aisles of people around tables, laughing at nothing, sipping on white wine. I want to sit across from kara and brittani in some nameless sushi bar again and pretend to watch my weight; something I constantly lose at home because I cant stand to sit around with my family and eat eat eat.

I want to know every language ever spoken, wander through the streets of prague and buy something overflowing with carbohydrates from a market vendor. I want to be irresponsible with no consequences, flitting across borders at my leisure to have coffee with someone in belgrade. Eat handmade pizza in florence again. Mostly, I just want to feel like I don’t always have to be oppressed by this constant hammering of responsibility, pounding on and on like a neverending techno thump. I would take voice lessons and learn to play the guitar if I could holler a single note on key.