In a jiff

fleef

! Look at this! I just read it in an article for Counseling (the course):

Thus, it helps to begin sessions with children by sharing

something fun and interesting. Games, clay, and toys in the counseling room are

useful when dealing with children. You will find that children generally like to do

something with their hands while they talk; having a child draw a picture during

rhe conversation can often be useful to the child and to the interviewer. And the

drawings often reveal what is going on in the child’s life.

It appears that I’ve retained this… The older I get, the more I notice people sort of peer at me when I pull out the composition book and start drawing while we speak… It’s not something I want to give up to adult custom, so I ignore how it might be different.

 

Kudos to Steven for the new banner inspiration! I was talking to him about how I feel I’ve given up alot of my freedom to be baffling to others for the sake of being easily understood by others, I suppose, and Steven said, “It saddens me that you’ve circumscribed the kook for others…. The kook! The kook!” The murder dreams and the pervading sadness over time grieve this… and won’t let me settle peacably into a slightly-dead-inside adult routine. I know at least three people in my life who have inadvertently discouraged my originality by saying something like, “You always have to be different”, as if I’m purposefully trying to show up the people around me. It just so happens that, in order to be authentic, the difference just happens so. But if we’re all being authentic, not one of us needs to feel less special!

The font is sticking with me from now on, I guess (in this entry).

I saw The Uninvited with Annie and her friend Kendall for $1.50 at Golden Triangle Mall last night. hahahah. I spent half the time hiding my face behind a popcorn bag and waiting for the suspenseful music jolt to be over. I’m glad Annie and Kendall were – and even all eight other people in the theatre seemed – open to aloud banter. Some memorable mome’s:

when dead-mom’s-nurse-turned-dad’s-girlfriend Rachel was trying to make friends with daughter Anna, she said, “I became someone that no one fucked with.” It seems like a writer forgot how most White upper-middle class families speak.

Anna knocked a roast off the counter. Rachel shrieked, “What did you do!”, and in one motion swooped down, stabbed it with a cutlery knife, and slammed it on the counter like a Viking.

In reference to the roast she said, “You know the secret to a roast? Let it sit for ten minutes before carving it. It lets the blood soak in.”

Also, “Some of those people I nursed treated me like dirt, but I knew they would be dead very. very. soon.”

So many bold-faced “I’M A MURDERER” leads.

and yeah I understand what the filmmakers are meaning to convey. I just laugh at obvious speech or the contrast between what most people in real life would do and what people in movays do. I guess Anna was ‘psycho’ in the end, so the world would have seemed like a scarier place from her eyes anyway. Why am I analyzing this.

They were out of large popcorn bags, too, so we paid for a medium and got a free refill! It was delicious. Small, run-down theatres might have better popcorn.

 Annie wore a dress and a plastic crown she’d donned at her flat, and I thought of how INFPs are the princess (or prince) of their own fairytales.

 

 

popcorn

I’m not shy enough to ruin my life. I can still attend classes, make okay grades, and talk to people with a nervous, timid, sometimes friendly energy.

I’m just shy enough to keep happiness out of it.

Sleep dep high is gone… Rehearsal sucked. I don’t feel flexible. I fear the stigma of mental illness and fall toward claiming it. Like being ashamed of a deformed little brother, so he runs up to you on the playground and calls out, “Hey, Sis!”

One thing that was neat tonight was Morgan’s house. He immediately showed me his giant cat Master Jones or “Massey”, an orange Norwegian something, who really is bigger than Waffle. Then he introduced me to Hershey the poodle. I enjoyed his house, because there was no pretense of not living in it. Food was on all the counters and in racks like a feast permanently laid out, and good food, I almost nipped a ginger slice. There was a conglomeration of couches and tables around a big-screen tv and people coming and going. I walked out of my parents’ mindset into the freefalling atmosphere of his house… I wish I could have absorbed it more. His initial friendliness made me hopeful, but then I got this sinking feeling that he thought I was bad in the scene, and I was bad. actually. I was bad. I was bad.

It’s sort of freeing to say though. I was bad. I was bad. I was soooooooooooooooo bad. I freakin didn’t change my intonation appropriately, I moved stiffly, I got distracted mid-sentence, I glanced at the director [turtle] more than ever according to her[turtle]… I was so baaaad hahahahaha a I was so bad hahahaahahahahahaah

And I’m still alive!  That’s the thing. Doing a bad job at something becomes less frightening when you are allowed to live after doing so. Not like those other times when they……

It’s about time I sucked at something anyway. Right? Am I right?

But seriously I’ll use spring break to tune myself up and destroy the reverence of those lines so they can live.

a ringa ringa ringa a ringa ringa ringa a ringa ringa ring a ring a ring <–Slumdog Millionaire song stuck in head

I do want to be more friends with turtle and Morgan. They’re intelligent but not swollen.

Note: I originally made this Private, but it turned out not that personal.

Other note: Because I gave up Facebook, I may be coming here more. But I wonder if this is a better place, encouraging me to be generative rather than lose myself in other people? Yes. I’ll decide that now. Yep.

Flip

I put the Mirah discography on shuffle in iTunes and started it on “Engine Heart”. The next song it played was “Archipelago”, which comes right after “Engine Heart”. I became judgmental.

“What do you think ‘shuffle’ means, iTunes? Consecutive?”

My brownies have become called cake. My cake has become better with time and refridgeration. Cool in two senses!

Flann and I both have sparkly brown eyes, so now I look out for people with those. Inconsequential? Please answer for me. It’d be so much easier to have other people’s opinions. I don’t blame them if they’re way off. But me, mine “has” to be immaculate. Very little in my life is actually urgent, so I put quotations around that. It really sunk in today as I went from class to bubble tea to home where I ate a delicious sharp cheddar grilled cheese encased in bread machine bread… and grapes… and cake… and popcorn. And water that comes from a tap instead of a well three miles away. I mean, water doesn’t come out of those metal things naturally, ya know? I stop and think about that sometimes….

I played Chester today and came up with a neat sounding thing, until Waffle plopped himself between me and the amp like a knob of puppybutter and shoved his head under my strumming hand. His directness is so endearing that I don’t get mad.

Atomic Happiness

I had an idea to make a movee about how your happiness is in your own hands.  Cause usually in movies the protagonist ends up getting what they want so that they’re happy at the end.  Well, maybe not totally usually.  I just thought of a lot of counterexamples.  This always happens when I make a point… 

well, anyway,

I guess mostly I’m thinking of the scores of mediocrities that are produced…

now I sound really elitist

 

If I could ever get out of my way, I would maybe elaborate the idea that I had.

I got the idea when I was petting my dog sitting on a mattress in the middle of my Uncle Paul’s loft.  The space of his place can make you feel very alone sometimes, especially when you’re not taking up much of it curled up on a mattress stroking your darling Waffle.  His little brown eyes blink every time I pet his head… awwww… getting distracted…. Tahoe likes to lay nearby to protect Waffle ‘n’ me and also to get in on the belly-rub action.  I got an image in my head similar to my current situation, only around it were painted worse circumstances than mine.  The girl didn’t just feel alone even though her uncle was in the next room.  She was alone, and I imagined other things that had happened to her.  She didn’t get the guy.  She didn’t achieve her dreams.  Her family was fragmented, and her friends were all far away living their own lives.  She was alone in a room in an old warehouse, sitting on a mattress, petting her dog as he blinked his little brown eyes.  I was thinking the whole movie would follow her through her pursuits and how they all failed.  But then she would be happy at the end, even though absolutely nothing worked out.  She would simply decide, “I’m tired of being sad about all of this.  I choose happiness.”  It would take an excellent actress to actually convey that to the audience without words… otherwise the end would be baffling. 

 

Alot of things that I write seem to be psychologically based, probably because the battles of my life have almost always been internal.  Especially the decision to exude happiness/joy/peace from my very atoms even if it came from nowhere else.

 

 

Still craving popcorn.  I was going to go see The Dark Knight again today and get the $5 first matinee price at 10:30 am, but at 9:30 Waffle was laying so sweetly and warmly next to me that I couldn’t move.  Also, I’m not sure if I can subject myself to that intensity again… even though I enjoyed it…  Maybe I could make more observations if I see it again, though, because the first time I was definitely wrapped up in the emotions and suspense.  I mean, I know what’s going to happen now.  Hum.  I could still get the $6.50 matinee price if I went right now.  I have to work at 5:30.  I could still make it.

 

Mayyybe.

I could read Yeong’s copy of Watchmen for free, though.  But that involves no popcorn.  I wish I could just walk in and buy popcorn and leave.  Oh my gosh, is that what this comes down to? 

All other food pales in comparison…

 

I could turn this “nothing works out” story into a Paint comic at least.  Since Steven and I aren’t talking, I feel weird continuing my Angela’s Friends comic right now. 

Why can’t Steven and I decide to be friends again?  That’s how it worked before when we disagreed.  Maybe I felt like I compromised too much.  Maybe I was too idealistic, though (which is very very very very possible).  Then again, I have to separate us in my mind, which space will help me do.  For awhile I think we were just becoming melded together.  Bad news.  We’re really not the same person.  Which is fine.  I know we’ve enjoyed each other’s differences before.  It could happen again.  I think of my friends in places in my life, like “emotional twin”, “pop culture connection”, “intellectual challenge”, “partner in art”… I guess according to what they do for me.  Steven had seemed displaced for awhile up until our official separation.

Hop

Popcorn keeps crossing my mind. 

 

Stretching toward an expansive miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiind

It seems to rest in the details of this plane. (plane of existence, not Snakes on a)

 

Pandora is pushing the “adult contemporary” version of Sufjan Stevens’s’s’s’s “Chicago” like a Rytalin dealer on a playground.

 

You know what’s an annoying word to say in the plural?  “Vests”.  I AVOID IT.  Veststststststststststs

 

Ahhhh I think my spine’s disintegrating.

 

I definitely can’t expand my mind in this stupid glowing rectangle.  I need to go outside.  I hopped around in my backyard tonight, and I got so happy bouncing from foot to foot and singing “Weeeeeeight chaaaange.  Weeeeeeight chaaaaange”, then I started changing the spelling in my mind, “Wait.  Chaaaaaaange!  Wait.  Chaaaaaaange!”  I realized that that song had come from the activity, that music and motion are tied together for me, and that I have to do both if I want to have either, and that you have to live in order to create art because you’re a FUNNEL for it.  A funnel from life to art.  You’re the instrument.  Voila!

AJSAMG

At Opening Bell Coffee where I work now, we make chicken salad on-site for use in our relatively famous chicken salad sandwich.  I’d never made it until last Tuesday, when I finally learned the process of cubing chicken, dicing water chestnuts, grating ginger… among other unorthodox ingredients that piqued my interest in this particular simple cuisine affair.  I was really hungry today at the beginning of my shift, and, after making like ten chicken salad sandwiches for other people, I finally made one for myself (on a croissant.  mmmm mmm mm). 

And it blew my mind.  It was amazing.  So satisfying.  Such a medley of refreshing flavors.  Oh man.  So good.  It was so good that it floats just below my consciousness now, I guess in the place where my stomach is, an image of a golden buttery croissant gently hugging the mayonnaise-coated elements of chicken and salad.  It’s reassuring.  “You’ll have another one of me tomorrow, Angela.  Don’t worry.”  So now I understand its relative fame.  It tastes great.

 

At the beginning of summer, I liked a boy named Anthony.  I wrote about him on here as “Pat” about a month ago.  It turns out that Anthony liked me, too.  And so after we unveiled that, things have fit together lately in a somewhat astounding way.

Oh, and he lives with me.  But the living came before the liking.  A summer housemate first, and then…

 

I’m still figuring out how to be myself around him and not be sabotaged by repetitious thoughts of “It will never work, it will never work, it will never work…”  Why can’t it?  Isn’t that up to him and me?  Even if there is an inevitable Fate, I can’t possibly know what it is, so I might as well understand what I can and can’t control and act within those limitations.

 

Suddenly sleepy.  I was going to make popcorn and eat it, but maybe I’ll just sleep.

My brainwaves feel flat.  I hope my writing doesn’t reflect that too much.

There Will Be CRAP

Bad news: I just saw There Will Be Blood.  Good news: the ticket was student-discounted and the popcorn was fantastic!  Best popcorn of 2008.  Pretty good Fanta, too.

Here are some snide remarks I made about the movie (in my head or sometimes out loud), with movie lines italicized and my lines not:

“I’m your brother from another mother.”

“I just got out of my coma after having battled my evil twin because we were both in love with the same amnesiac woman, but that love story ended when we found out we were sex-altered clones.  Do you believe me?  We only have so many… Days of Our Lives.”

 “You’re just a bastard in a basket.  A bastard in a basket.  A BASTARD IN A BASKET!  A BASTARD IN A BASKET!”

“You’re a basket-CASE!  And in case you haven’t figured it out after more than a decade, your son is deaf!  As dramatic as your yelling may be, even a drunkard with cirrhosis to your degree might save his voice.”

Later…

“Who edited this?  Did they accidentally release all the bad parts?”

“Interest…. waning……”

“Who the hell would let their kid work on an oil derrick?”

“I feel like I have mud shoved up my nose… the mud of inhumanity.”

I wrote a more intelligent description of my reasons for my intense dislike of this movie and posted it with a 3 (or 2? I don’t remember) on metacritic.com.  I had to, because I kept ranting to my innocent bystander roommate who hadn’t even heard of the movie about how awful it was.  I had to let my irritation, frustration, nauseation out somewhere.  And yes, part of me wants to prove to the indifferent world that it’s not that I can’t handle art films.  I can handle weirdness.  I can handle movies that require long attention spans.  I don’t need a constant tap-dance-ragtime-piano act of entertainment.  But I had to work really hard to stay with this movie, and I got nothing out of it, except don’t piss off or even associate with Daniel Plainview.  Luckily for me, I didn’t answer that personal ad from Oily Dan P.  Could’ve been the mistake of my life.  Bullet dodged.  Phew!

Having spewed on metacritic, I am calming down as I write this.  But I think I want to get out the last of my rage.  I wish I could remember what I had written.  Hmmm…. I thought I made some valid points.  Well, of course I did.  I agree with me.

A great many of the journal and newspaper critics gave it a 10.  There was much citing of the performances within the movie.  THE PERFORMANCES DID NOT REDEEM THE ENTIRE EXPERIENCE.  If the film as a whole isn’t sound, I chalk it up as a list of well-done elements when dissected but a clunky machine when the parts are together.

Maybe I’ve just never dealt well with horror.

Am I closed-minded for not liking it?  I don’t think so.  I gave it a lot of chances.