October 9, 2002

Someone has already filled your locker, but no one can fill your role. You may not think you affect lives as much as you do… you would be surprised. The girl who has your locker now… she’s annoying. God awful annoying. She has a whiney voice that reminds me of microphone feedback, and an irritating face that smiles and yet wrinkles its nose in disgust at the same time, and she’s always complaining about things that are irrelevant. You know the type.

I think everyone complains a lot more than I noticed before. Did I do this too? Now I just sit there completely silent. Oh I’ll answer people if they ask me questions – always so pointless, but I’m not impolite. I’ll apologize, quiet but sincere, when I’m in someone’s way, but other than that I stay so silent. I’m always questioning – do I hate this or do I love this? You don’t go anywhere, you just trace the line back and forth back and forth till you feel like your knees are broken and your arms are made of pudding. Then you go back and forth some more.

What did I ever enjoy in this sport? I liked to complain. I liked meets when I felt I really did my best. I loved meets when everyone felt so good about themselves. I loved long bus rides listening to music and sighing over boys. Sighing, and singing just for fun. I really liked finding secret places under construction and taking pictures. I loved eating way too many of the free cookies, and I loved working out in Florida when the weather was just so perfect and you could feel the glorious sun shining on your back burning the swimmer’s tattoo of a speedo line into your skin.

So I stay, and I know if I left my parents would become irrational. My dad might understand but my mom… who knows what she would do. Stop talking to me? Stop paying for my books? Stop encouraging me? I’m not sure. One thing is for sure, she’d stop bragging to her friends, and heaven forbid she no longer have anyone to brag about. My sister isn’t quite enough, and an over-achiever for a youngest daughter isn’t enough either, this over-achiever has to maintain a 3.5 in college and stay active in a varsity sport and participate in every club possible… oh and take a full class load too. I’m such a good daughter.

I stay and I stay silent and work hard. All I want to do is just get it done with and get out. I hear everyone around me saying the most irrelevant things and I want to scream at the kid who is just so loud and stupid. He is so dim and so loud and it’s not his fault. He’s kind and smiles a lot and really there’s no problem with him other than he’s just too loud. I secretly plot all their deaths in my head and the only time I let out a sound is when I laugh.

I laugh at the most inappropriate times. I laugh at the things that are supposed to be taken seriously because they just can’t be taken seriously any more. I hear them and I laugh and all I can hear after is your voice in my head saying “What a joke”. It’s true. I believe it. My laughing isn’t pleasant and enjoyable like Silent Matt… it’s more of a sinister cynical laugh. Laughing at them for even thinking I could take this seriously.

The best was when I was standing in lane four, surrounded by freshman girls staring wide-eyed at the man who had come to talk about NCAA rules. He started talking about alcohol and illegal substance abuse and I laughed. I laughed and I smiled and I looked over and I saw you. Though you had quit the day before, my eyes were never good and I could have sworn I saw you standing in lane six laughing at me too. The freshman girls with their bulging dear eyes looked at me and who knows what they thought, but their frowns made me wonder if my laugh had startled them.

Little did they know I wasn’t even really there… I was watching you “flick fire” with Ken. I was smelling the smoke on my clothes afterwards and wondering what it would be like to taste a clove. I was on the coffee table … dancing! Dancing with you and Kevin and Devon and I was goofing off, dressing up, putting lipstick marks on the cheeks of all the delicious boys. I was trying new things – I mean isn’t that what college is all about? You devote your time to trying new things and figuring out what is good and what is bad. Figuring out what you want to do with your life afterwards, and having fun with it to boot! I was defiantly not there. Not in the same old pool. Not doing the same old heart-busting, leg-throbbing, shoulder-ripping work outs. I was not listening to some guy tell me the NCAA tests you for street drugs like dope. I was not listening to Lindsey joke about having to give up her dope.

So perhaps you weren’t there but you were on my mind. You have not escaped so easily.

I find myself rushing out of practice. No more chatting, no more long showers, I just keep moving as fast as I can so I will get dressed and out of there and off to dinner before anyone else. As I towel off my hair and start pulling layer upon layer of drag suit off my body I look over half expecting you to be there, completely dressed already, packing your shit away into your bag and giving me a look that says “Why do I do this? I don’t want to wait for you… but I will”, and instead I see the locker that once was yours now full of some other girl’s shit. You would be proud of me, working so hard and getting out so fast just so we could walk to dinner together… but you’re not there. Has it even been a week? You’ve hardly been gone for a week and I feel like I may not make it through the season with out killing someone. You know how it is. At least I still see you around, and at least it was the sport you hated, and not me. I’m not sure what I would do if you were out of my life completely. You may not think you’ve touched my life so deeply, but you have.

Somewhere, tucked away in a corner of my life, there always seems to be a little old lady who smokes too much and refuses to wear her dentures .

It's hard to say no to little old ladies.

In Montana, it was Pauline. She was happier if you called her "Granny" - she seemed proud of the fact that she had become a grandmother at the age of 30. She had a decrepit orange cat named Foxy. It took me a while to figure out that she wasn't calling him Poxy. Her house reeked of cat piss and cigarette smoke, and I always got stuck there for at least half an hour. I had to arrange my Meals on Wheels route so that she was my last stop. Otherwise people would start calling the Senior Center and asking where lunch was.

Here in New Hampshire it's Marlene. I don't have a Meals on Wheels route anymore, but she sits in the pew in front of me at church. She had half of her pelvis removed this spring. Bone cancer. She needs help doing things like taking off her socks, so a bunch of us volunteered to take turns helping her get ready for bed. Tuesdays are my turn.

These days, when I leave the house to drive to her apartment it's startlingly dark. The air smells like wood smoke, and my car reports that the road may be icy if there's any precipitation. The wood smoke here smells different than the wood smoke in Montana. Less harsh, usually. More like home.

So I walk in the door of Marlene's apartment, and of course the windows are closed because it's cold. And I'm assaulted by the dense, stale evidence of all the cigarettes she's smoked today. And she's worried that her feet smell bad. "Honey," I tell her, "your feet have got nothing on my ex-roommate's. He had these boots..." And she actually laughs. Marlene never laughs.

I don't know why I call her Honey. I never call anyone Honey.

I don't know why I'm writing, except that I'm filled with a manic energy tonight. It happens to me a lot when I'm heavy with unmade child.

Okay, it's midnight now and I'm hungry and my browser just crashed. It's a sign.

G'night.

I don't like to think there's fate. I like to believe I control my own destiny and that it is not dictated to me or mapped out already. But then there are those days when the choices you make, and all the events that took place, seem as if they were just necessary steps towards this one summit. And then maybe you can rewind a little further back into the past, and start seeing all the other little things which led you to this. And it's really baffling.

As much as I admit to feeling like yesterday was the work of fate, I also feel a sense of control that I haven't felt in awhile. Maybe there's no fate. There's just a kind of gravity which pulls us in the right direction, and everything about yesterday was right.

Hello everyone, just wanted to let everyone know that I won't be needing shelter on my way to New York as I have found reasonably priced airline tickets!!!

If anyone feels like partying or hanging out or simply meeting me as I have almost no clue what any of you are like in person - with the exception of Dann, KidCharlemagne, Apirkle, The Giant Ass and a few others - that would be very cool.

I'll be there from the 3rd through the 11th of January in Manhattan. Anyone with ideas for neat things to do (I'm already probably going to see the Daily Show, so that will be cool) or desire to hook up /msg me!

Peace out ya'll.

---

I feel good!

I went to see Sue Hall today - she a massage therapist, and so much more. She is a medical-certified hypnotherapist, a Reiki Master, trained in reflexology, and theraputic touch. She incorporates all of the above into a single session, lasting 30 minutes to an hour and half. I had a treatment today that lasted a full 90 minutes, and for the first time since my back injury, my back has absolutely no pain at all. This feels very good, but soo weird. ^_^

I am going back to Sue next week, and hopefully this wonderful pain-free feeling will last.

I mentioned that my next daylog would be after I am engaged and tonight was the big night.

Ever since she started college this semster, we have planned a night where we would get together and go out on a date. Wednesday has been that day. It has usually been Barnes and Nobles where we would sit together, discuss life, drink coffee and look at books. (Sometimes its better then a library, don't know how many libraries let you bring drink in them.) Anyway tonight was going to be different.

Last week I told her that I would like to take her out on a picnic at a park. However the weather here in Grand Rapids, Michigan has not been the best park going weather lately. So we decided to have the date anyways but this time it was going to be downtown, so we could go to the muesum or something if it was too cold or rainy.

Anyways, it was a beautiful day and we had the chance to sit oustide and eat and just as sunset was coming and we were packing up... I asked the question. "Will you marry me..." And then she said yes....

So that's that, now the fun of planning a wedding starts.

What have I gotten myself into? In class tonight, I learned that AACR2 has specific rules for cataloging books by dead people. No, not people who wrote books when they were alive, but people writing books after their death. By being channeled by a spirit medium. Yes, like that Crossing Over idiot. I shit you not:

21.26. SPIRIT COMMUNICATIONS

21.26A.Enter a communication presented as having been received from a spirit under the heading for the spirit (see 22.14). Make an added entry under the heading for the medium or other person recording the communication.

22.14. SPIRITS

22.14A. Add (Spirit) to a heading established for spirit communications (see 21.26).

Parker, Theodore (Spirit)

Beethoven, Ludwig van (Spirit)

Espirito Universal (Spirit)

I have yet to decide if this is really creepy, really cool, or really anal retentive. Probably a combination of all three. The next year might be a lot more interesting than I thought.

Cataloging class seems to be my designated day log whipping boy, which is a product of my love-hate relationship with my class. My other three classes are pretty straightforward, but this one is difficult not because it’s the hardest of the four, but paradoxically because it’s the easiest. Conceptually, the material itself is relatively easy (though not as easy as it might seem to the layman), but because it’s so easy I find it difficult to concentrate on power point slides and what indicators to use in the 245 field and the professor’s Korean accent. So I spend much of the class reading e2 and Slate and Salon and my email. Then when it comes time to remember what goes where, I spend an hour looking up stuff in my copy of AACR2 and the OCLC website. Whine, whine, whine, I know, the solution is just to buckle down, which I will do on Sunday with a study group from the class. But between that and the campus College Bowl tourney on Saturday, I wonder when I’ll find time for that paper for my Government Documents that’s due on Monday…

After checking out a trio of books by and on Nicolás Guillén (I don’t have time, but how can I resist poetry?), it was off to Olive Garden with some friends for banter with the waitress and a never-ending pasta bowl – the pasta doesn’t end but the room in your stomach does. And then we went to Mer_Girl’s place and made plenty of jokes about her interesting new line of work. (I’ll let her tell you about that one.) After the early birds went home, Mer_Girl and I fired up Grand Theft Auto III and gleefully spent what seemed like hours running over hookers and other assorted pedestrians, shooting down police helicopters with rocket launchers, and picking off old ladies and joggers with a sniper rifle like it was Maryland. And yet, I was troubled by the fact that we took such glee in wanton slaughter, but when she switched off the Playstation, I knew why the instant I saw the infomercial. The banality of this empty culture drives us to seek pure, visceral experience, no matter how amoral or brutal. Or at least this is the best theory I can come up with at 6am. Besides, the game rocks, especially when you get a tank.