two.points.collapsing

damn fast food worker. cheeseburgers are much less satisfying without a certain key ingredient: cheese. dumb wrong-button-pressing, stupid-hat-wearing, honest-mistake-making fast food worker… how could she do this to me?

for all interested, this is the last week of radio programming here, and the last night of the semester to hear my show. the link’s at the right, you can figure it out on your own.

careful now, this is where we get serious again.

i was thinking to myself today, and really for the past month or more, how much easier things would be if i didn’t care one way or another about girls. or getting a girl to like me. any girl, that is.

i know a lot of people say that you should be happy being single, be happy with yourself, before you go looking for a relationship. i don’t know what those people feel inside, but i think that’s total nonsense. maybe they have something i’ll never have, but i don’t want it. to me, the ultimate goal has always been to find that perfect point of human contact with someone special. sure, i’m a fine person without it, but that doesn’t mean i don’t spend plenty of time trying to find it. or being sad and lonely and down when i can’t find it and don’t even know where to begin looking. or if i’m lucky, being absolutely thrilled when i think i have it, even just for a while.

i felt awful the other night, and for no reason other than that i wanted someone to put my arm around. i know what brought it on, but that’s not the point as much as this: other than this specific void, my life is just fine right now. i’m in good health, school is school but going alright, and i have the best friends i could ask for. but every few days i get in a funk because of this, and it’s just no good. i want to shake it off. i want to put it on hold until i at least meet someone worth turning it back on for. because as it stands, there’s no one around to work my charm on, and i just feel like i’m banging my head against a wall looking for anything close to love, because there aren’t any candidates. maybe i could be happy then just being me, alone.

but i can’t turn it off. i can’t not think about how i wish there was someone to daydream about. maybe i don’t really want to turn it off, because it’s such a nice romantic malady.

it sure would make things easier sometimes though.

this will be the triumphant week of saying after classes finish, “well, that’s the last time i have to come listen to this ever again.” i love that feeling. i seem to elate in putting things behind me, generally. i just can’t help feeling good when i know i’m moving along with things, passing markers, making progress (supposedly). not even toward a definite goal, necessarily, but just moving forward with my life in a measurable way feels really satisfying.

but then again, so do cheeseburgers. two hours of this class left and i will have my satisfaction.

last night my friend/former roommate/current couch-dweller josh used the word “fantastipotamus” instead of “good” in a sentence. how can you not be glad this guy is back in your apartment?

my friend shannon has hilarious stories about infants. you can read them from her though.

oh, and i “put up” our “christmas tree” last night in the apartment. it’s maybe 20 inches tall, but boy did i put a lot of lights on that little sucker. so now there are shining lights along our countertop and a little joyous tree of holiday cheer. it’s so cute. i felt like my dad, stringing lights around this thing, except that it was really tiny instead of seven feet tall. still, you have to do something for the holiday season, i think, otherwise it goes by without any notice, and it means you’re a cold-hearted bastard. me, i see myself more as a beacon of light and goodness.

sometimes you think you’ve won, but you haven’t, because the game just isn’t over yet.

the infamous laker flag sighting game (see archives for explanation, i don’t want to talk about it right now) i thought i had clinched with a mid-november sighting turns out to have gone to the unlikely winner, neither dom nor myself, but our friend shannon. she says this morning driving hom from ralph’s, on fucking december the second, she saw a faded, beat up lakers flag still flying proudly from the car of the man who is unarguably the lamest man in los angeles. i hang my head in shame and clench my fists in jealous anger at her for having seen it instead of me; but i have to say–well done, miss shannon. well done.

that bitch.

in other news, this will be the last week of classes, i fly home two weeks from yesterday for a well-deserved and highly anticipated break from all this school business, and goonies was on tv last night. not a bad run, so far. i’m really in the home stretch here, too, because it looks like most of the really bothersome business is behind me at this point. in this case, i know for sure when the game ends, and if i don’t have the highest score ever it won’t be as important as the fact that i had a good time and get to start fresh again soon. i know that’s what i’m really in need of anyway.

i’ve spent most of today working. it’s saturday for christ’s sake! there was a time in my life where even thinking about doing homework on saturday was unheard of. now i spend most of the afternoon and evening working at my computer on my part of a group project. times, they’ve changed. of course, in a measly three semesters i’ll be done with school forever, probably. then my weekends will be all mine! ha!

i have to say i didn’t really mind the work i’ve been doing today though. the assignment is to make a magazine, and my part is to do one of the articles. i had already written the words, and was just doing the layout stuff. i think i already talked about this a couple days ago (scrolls back a few days….). yes, i did. well, i was working on it even more today. and i have to say, it turned out very magazine-like. i’m sort of impressed with myself. fun things can be done with the photoshop, let me tell ya.

i just discovered something bizarre. i don’t know if any of you use mapquest to get driving directions, but i have before. anyway, tonight i was on there looking for a map of northern illinois to see where the hometowns of my friends were in relation to each other in an attempt to start planning my big winter trip. i punch in “chicago, illinois” hoping to get a nice medium-sized, general map. i didn’t get what i wanted, so i started fiddling with it. i thought maybe i could rezoom or something to get the right amount of information. then i noticed there was a tab on the top of the little map that said “street map”, and next to it one that said, “aerial photo”. hmm, let’s click on aerial photo.

and it’s an actual photograph from a satellite! the particular region i was looking at appeared to be some sort of shipping yards or something. but this was a bizarre discovery. so i punched in my address here and zoomed all the way in. up popped a reasonably sized view of the surrounding neighborhood–in enough detail that i could easily pick out our apartment building. i told my roommate, who tried his home address, and was also very wowed. then he said, “whoa, my neighbors had their pool filled in!” really, i think this is almost creepy. try it yourself. some satellite has been taking pictures of your home, and you didn’t even know it. just imagine, if they allow this sort of thing to be open to the public, the detailed and zoomed in pictures the goverment could take of you if they wanted to . . . (shudder).

katrina at debris has me near the top of a list that is not alphabetical, obviously, and so i will assume that it means she likes me second best. that’s more than i get from most people, so i must give her credit for this. and for having an interesting weblog.

katrina is from the houston area. my parents live there now, in a town called spring. katrina and i might have gone to the same movie once and never known it. isn’t the world strange when you think about it?

i’ve laughed pretty hard at a few things lately, but not as much as i did at matt’s drawing at the hero. holy shit that’s some good stuff. but not for the easily offended, maybe, so don’t blame me if your mom looks at it and sends you to your room.

a nice quote of the day from tonight’s living room chill session:

dom, josh, myself and shannon are sitting and talking. dominic recalls: “oh, i saw the girl with the nicest ass ever on the way home from class tonight…” (he goes into some details, we laugh).

shannon: “boys are so gross. i consider you guys the cream of the crop, the nicest boys i know, and here you are talking about some girl’s ass.”

dom: “what do you want me to do, come back and say, ‘oh, today i was so nice‘?”

and that last part was in the appropriate prissy voice. it was hilarious.

i hope he doesn’t mind that i’m always taking his material and sharing it in this public forum. if he ever decides to do standup, you will have already heard half of his act through me because i think he’s so funny.

one of my group projects for the end here is to put together a mini magazine and write articles for it based on one of the essays we read in class. it’s sort of a convoluted project, involving analyzing the essay, picking apart the “signifier” and “signified” of the magazine, and then trying to combine them… ugh.

tonight i was trying to make my article. i say make, because i wrote it, but now i have to get pictures, and do the layout. this is a lot more work than you might think, but it’s pretty fun. it makes me think going to design school would have been a lot more fun than business school, as do so many things, like even making simple webpages. alas, all my vast pools of creativity going to waste.

i’ve worked on this long enough though for one night. it’s high time i played some video games, or my mind is going to get all mushy.

i was going to write something earlier, but the computer lab i stopped by between classes was chock full of business jerks. figures.

today wasn’t half bad. i still find it amusing that living in LA has conditioned me to be really happy when we get a gray, rainy day. this morning was chill and drizzling, and i liked it. after working a few hours i went and got hot cocoa and a donut and walked to my next class, in the rain, and it was great. the weather, on days like this, just makes me feel so peaceful and introspective and aware, even. it feels more like life is going on when there’s bad weather and you just walk through it smiling anyway. it’s more real this way instead of just trying to be beautiful on another sunny los angeles afternoon.

i also saw a volkswagen beetle (not one of the new ones) driving down one of the wide university sidewalks through the middle of campus today. the two guys inside could have been maintenance people, or maybe they were just passing through and took a wrong turn onto a sidewalk at some point. it made me chuckle though.

tonight would be a perfect night to sit around on the couch with a girl and watch a movie and talk until we were sleepy. it’s a shame that i seem to be incapable of finding one to even propose this to though. no numbers to call, no doors to knock on. just me and the computer here. certain someones are not having this problem, to make matters worse — although i don’t hold it against her. it’s just like a mirror being held up to my own current love life, is all. the reflection is awfully empty.

good bye good mood.