oh, sometimes i am so sure, and sometimes i am so convinced i am being a fool who doesn't ask enough questions and whose lack of skills for serious conversation may come back to bite her in the ass.

zurg

I am convinced of the awesomeness of my old stomping grounds. I like my suburbian town, my city across the bay, that old punk venue I used to go to, everything. It takes showing it to somebody else who has never seen it and appreciates it, going to places you haven't been in years because you thought you knew what it was all about to learn to love it again or even for the first time.

Disneyland = love. And it is so fabulous because I experienced it with so many different people. Trust me, it's a different place each time you go with a different arrangement of people. This past weekend, it was an assortment of the finest chocolates.

with the time you have left

It's up to me to do what I will with the time I have left. My grandparents have been to something like ten funerals in the last month. They have lost 35 friends in the last year. They are 80 and 83 years old. They are still travelling, they are still planning a cruise to Norway, my Grandpa still drives across half the country once a year. To me, them dying is far away. They are the only grandparents I've ever gotten to know - my brother and I are their only grandchildren. Mortality is a frightening concept to think closely about. It is like repeating a word over and over again - the experience of repeating the sounds overwhelming the small, unimportant word. So I think and think about death and when it's coming and how it's going to be and it's scary. It's really frightening. My grandparents used to have a nice group of ten best friends. Only one lady and them are left. I read an article today in a local paper about the little sister of a friend. At 3:03 pm on March 3, 2003, she was in a really horrible accident. She was in the hospital for 28 days and her condition was on and off, she was going to die, she was going to survive. She was 5 years old at the time. I didn't know this. And all of a sudden - this little baby I used to know, who ran around the ice rink, was in a head-on collision and close to death. I didn't even know.

'One Hundred Years of Solitude' waits for me at my bedside. My bed beckons to me all day long. I lay here with the sun streaming through the window and everything else gets lost. I can't be bothered about housing or a job or anything difficult though I know I need to deal with it. My comfort lies in sleeping, reading, curling up with my cats, curling up with the laptop, running errands and eating lunch with my mom. Tomorrow I will look for jobs, maybe. Tomorrow I will write the letters my dad wants me to write - I doubt I'm going to get the job back that I had last summer, sweet as it was, as much as they loved me.

Tomorrow night my family will eat pizza and watch British mysteries. Tomorrow night I wonder what I will have accomplished tomorrow.

I am at home and exhaustion has set in. The kittens are by my side ready to go to bed. So far there are no signs of any permanent or even semi-permanent emotional damage. Lost luggage got delivered by man who expected a tip. I was pissed off so of course I didn't give him one, maybe also the fact that I have 14 cents total in material posession. If you can't tip well, don't tip at all - it's more of an insult to give a low tip than no tip. So are the little lessons of life etiquette. Hello, life. Kristina, signing on. Tomorrow morning I will unpack and deconstruct the life I have just left. I miss it already.

Today is my last day here at Macalester until September 1, and even then, it is still a first of lasts. I had my last lunch in Cafe Mac today. I had a grilled cheese that made me sick - so it was a proper sendoff. While last year the last day seemed to be full of friendly good-byes and organized good-bye brunches, today is much lonelier. I am much more on my own. Right now I am waiting for a DVD to burn in the HRC. I am here past closing hours. I don't know why it is taking so long to burn. This is pissing me off because I'm supposed to be moving out in 45 minutes. My computer will not be dismantled and my auntie will be upset with me. So it goes.

My head hurts and even the Diet Coke with Lime in front of me hasn't helped. My phone has no service and I am cut off from the world. It is dark and hot. What would an entirely dark and hot life be like? Miserable. I don't understand why this is taking so long.

I am not looking forward to summer. I am not looking forward to being the Kristina that is lazy and doesn't want to get in her car to go see friends because she thinks it will be hard work to see them. Distance is a strange love. I love it and hate it because of the conflicting emotions it makes me feel.

The spring was not glorious this year. Springfest was not a happy revelry on the lawn and the last week was not spent being distracted by short skirts and friends on blankets rolling around in the sun. There were no cookies to be shared nor movies to be watched outside on an itty bitty laptop. There were no 4 hours spent outside at night by the swings nor the idea of sleeping outside on the field. I will miss the tulips on Summit Ave, but they are the only thing spring like here.

I have grown. I have grown like the tulips and maybe I'm a yellow one with red tints. I am not a red tulip in full bloom. Hopefully that is yet to come. Maybe it will be in London; maybe it will be next semester when I learn how to cook and grocery shop effectively. Maybe it will be the summer of yearning and missing and hoping and losing.

Why can't I bring my mind to worry? Yet what is this discontent swirling around in the pit of my stomach - what is this constant pounding in my head? Get me out of here. Get me the hell out of Joisey.

I like people more than I ever thought possible here.

I need to finish an essay, find some boxes, perhaps to paint, perhaps to pack stuff in, perhaps to make spaceships out of, and generally make good use of the time I have left.

playlists speak louder than words.

i have none, no words.

Mixes are supposed to give off a certain ambience. Funny how when I listen to "The O.C. Mix 1" and "The O.C. Mix 2" I don't think of the television show at all. I think about myself and my life - playlists and music cater to egocentricism. Every song can somehow be yours. This is the test of a brilliant song. Get people to fight over emotional ownership of the song and you've got a top 10 billboard hit. Come on, get out those quills.

"when i am writing it seems to me that i follow a musical cadence or rhythm"

no, i am not that silly girl.

but i do not like change. there were questions on surveys about mental health that i took in my highschool years - to see if i were normal or depressed - to see if i were justifiably sad or just really lame - that asked if i liked change or if i was scared of it. i always thought i liked change - but i guess i thought of it as i liked to change television channels, clothing, and the desktop on my computer background, not as uprooting and rooting down lives.

so i lied on every survey i took because it seems to me that as long as i am happy, i never want change, i become scared of it. summer offers nothing, it does not beckon. right now right here offers easy company and settled situations, easy access and easy laughter. it's easy right now right here. i've got it all figured out. life has been so good to me for the last month or so - it's ridiculous and now i have to leave it. i don't like that because it's a change.

a great quote by f. scott fitzgerald:
“My own happiness in the past often approached such an ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distil into little lines in books – and I think that my happiness, or talent for self-delusion or what you will, was an exception. It was not the natural thing but the unnatural – unnatural as the Boom; and my recent experience parallels the wave of despair that swept the nation when the Boom was over.”

i saved the two boxes of girl scout cookies that i had for a very long time. the first box was opened in the occasion of a drunken night and the success of a requited friend crush. the second was opened because of a frustrating day and a disdain for a certain teacher and class and utter conviction that chocolate was the only way to help us. it says a lot these girl scout cookies, more than the carefully placed ethnically diverse awkward-aged girls on the cover of the boxes could ever do. but then again, they did get me these cookies. that's pretty sweet.