I think everyone here journals for the comments. What’s the point in posting, if not? We could all save these little entries in a Word document in some hidden folder on our computers if we didn’t want people to read them, like them, say something about them. I don’t know; it’s possible this is a projection, but this time I really don’t think so.

So what becomes of a journal deferred? That is, what happens to an entry that passes through the “Recent journal entries” list and is dumped into the “My Journal” page, commentless? Most of us probably regard that entry as a silly mistake. “Damn it,” we say. “Why did I post it? Now it’s just sitting there, all naked and stupid.” When really no one notices if one or two or even eight of your entries don’t have comments on them because everyone’s waiting for their own entries to collect its comments. It’s something I used to worry about though, I think, when I was posting regularly like three or four years ago. Well I don’t know if I was ever posting regularly. I’ve never quite fit it in online communities; oddly, I find the real life ones more comfortable.

Jeff’s interview with David Sedaris really rekindled my interest in him. I had only read “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” but now intend to zoom through all of his books, ending with the most recent. Why not? He’s a literary-comedic talent (despite his popularity), and I’m very fond of his quaint style.

Well, time for some late night ice cream. I’ve unintentionally lost like 25 lbs from being a bit sick the past few months, and I intend to get at least a small portion of it back now that my appetite is full swing. Hello, Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Blizzard. It’s a pleasure to eat you.

From my actual journal:

It is 3:22 in the morning and she has just gone to bed. I often wonder if she has taken the liberty of reading these journal entries of mine. She could very easily do this, as she has the backup hard drive and consequently has full access to all of my documents. She knows that I journal and that within the confines of this document (do pixilated margins count as confines?), I discharge even my most personal, most sublime and polluted thoughts. I wonder how she feels, sitting with that knowledge while I am safely at work slaving away on someone’s sprawling index, while she is alone, idly completing online puzzles on my computer because her internet does not work and I out of pity gave her unrestricted access. This trust is so vast and inexorable; it is the intoxicated trust that comes with meaningful relationships… a contented gleam in its eye and the faintest aroma of love on its breath. It is a trust that abides, subsists on subtle reassurances but is not without certain suspicions. I often wonder, but I do not move myself to worry.

The Fourth of July fireworks show downtown was not at all what I imagined it would be. I had decided that it was going to be a series fantastic and chaotic explosions raining over a deep purple sky, the upturned innocent faces of our liberal citizens awed and moving underneath. Instead, we couldn’t find the location precisely and ended up watching them from the other side of a highway, about three miles away from the bridge upon which they were being set off. Cars zoomed casually by and drowned out the distant spectacle, and the atmosphere, the buzz of celebration was utterly absent, though a crowd of people had formed near where we were standing, no doubt experiencing similar disappointment. An Asian man on the other side of her held his three year old son up in the air so that he could be amazed, even from afar, at the shimmering lights and the muted cracks that wracked the sky. He put the boy on his shoulders and bounced him. Everything was new for the boy. He could not, I suspect, remember having seen a similar show the year before, nor would he remember this one next year. Perhaps, it occurred to me, that is why kids retain their sunny dispositions with such ease – they have not yet lost the ability to let go of occurrences, to forget so completely those things, pleasant or not, that befell them yesterday, last month, or last year. Few events are solidified; they are only left with general impressions and schemas.

The Fourth of July fireworks show in sum was nothing more than an event. It filled our schedules as we attempted to escape the apartment full of beetles. One will do anything to avoid coming home to an infested apartment, and if it means watching fireworks on the wrong side of a highway, three miles away from the hub of the party, then so be it. She was there, however, and I was still marginally content. I felt a swelling affection for her during the finale and wished desperately that I could lean in to kiss her cheek (at least that, for god’s sake), but there was the watchful public shuffling around us. Neither of us has any desire to make ourselves more of a spectacle than the fireworks in the distant sky, and like walking stick insects, we crave the detached inconspicuousness of disguise. In open spaces populated by strangers, we are close friends, enjoying each other’s company, and nothing more. We dare to sneak kisses in the elevator, or squeeze each other’s hand on the bus sometimes, but “making a scene” as it were is an entirely different matter.

As it is now 3:50 in the morning you can imagine that I’ve been stopping frequently while writing to contemplate things. It is impossible to tell what things, precisely; they drift by so swiftly, without name or definite shape. Emotions are more readily pinned down. I am anticipating something and cannot tell what. Sometimes I feel there is no one who walks among the majestic trees and stones of this planet that houses so many anxious visitors in her mind as I. They pile in, these foreigners, one by one, directionless, having come from horrible places, without announcement or any intent of going on their way.

Second week into summer courses. Prating of the rain on my gray bedroom window, the smell of worms and stagnant puddles seeping in. I’ve been considering the Sex and the City movie, and a week-old chocolate chip cookie and what it might do for my taste buds. I would like there to be a “Refresh” button, as there is on a web browser, located somewhere behind my ear or any such inconspicuous place because I want to refresh myself physically, but more important, mentally.

Went to a concert the other night. An old friend / love interest was supposed to have been there but didn’t show up in favor of working late. She and her boyfriend need every penny they can scrape together to do this marriage thing. It was centuries ago I used to believe I was in love with that girl, and yet, I still feel the radiation damage whenever I see her. Cue strings, cue soft hued lights; there is a deep, balmy shudder that wracks my ribcage when she first leans in to talk to me over the din of a party. Flashback to five Junes ago, sharing a hairbrush microphone, screaming obnoxiously into our reflections on the black TV screen. Flashback to her making me play the love song I wrote over and over; imploring-pleading-begging to know who it was written for; knowing, I think, subconsciously that it was her. I hate admitting that I’m such a ragdoll. I won’t go to the wedding; it will only bewilder me.

If the girl who is getting married to the ruddy fool with the premature beer belly is, say, a princess – the girl I am currently committed to is an august queen. Smarter, funnier, more sensitive, more sensible, and cuter in an interesting way. I think all the princess has over the queen is a vague charisma, some ineffable charm, and the quality of being unreachable. I am positive that I am much luckier than Mr. Fool, and yet I envy him for winning the romantic affections of the girl I never could have, when I was an unwise spoony years ago.

The rain has become more insistent – shriller and less percussive. It sounds like full applause. The anxiety pills (the antidepressants) in the orange container peering from the kitchen counter make me feel like I’m some modern Sylvia Plath. Or some uninteresting gay version of her. I’m torn between taking the first pill and throwing them all in a bonfire under the purple June sky.

How to be honest:

Tell of the messy hair and the little plaid shirt; the big, pensive, slightly melancholy eyes; the gentle-gentle fingertips. Tell about the tired love that drags itself through the unflattering light of domesticity (tell how you are not too young to see and understand the fences of domesticity about you). Tell not about the first time kissing her, on the roof of the physic building, but about how she read the Somatoform portion of Chapter 8 in the psychology textbook aloud for you when your head had again wandered irretrievably into the hot mire of a migraine, or about anchoring in the cramped, drab monitor’s station where she worked on a Friday nights while those who used to be your friends were off giggling at clubs and parties.

Detail, if any muse may permit, the dilute power in mundane irritation, tongues in iron clamps, the whetstone of anger having scraped it into little confused blades—or the unsettled, amplified silence that mild quarrels beget. Or if you prefer, how it is to try the door handle, find that it is unlocked, and enter with the sublime knowledge that she’s in there.

Set aside the giddy splashing in Lake Michigan last summer, which any two clichés in love would enjoy blithely, but recall instead how it was to hold her hand under the water where no living thing save for the sickly green algae could witness it. While occasioning the pathway of the hiding, tell also about the lying, by swift invention or by rote; about your high school friend Alli as she gazed at your legs, your arms, wondering to herself what aberration had prevented you, at 19, from having ever had a hand to hold or lips to kiss. Tell, of course, about the lips you kiss in secret, but spend only one metaphor on it, for everyone knows of lips.

Tell even about the two mothers, yours and hers, whose vast differences if numbered would amount to an epic catalogue grander than Homer’s 1000 ships or Virgil’s myriad warriors, yet who are mothers united in their dormant seeds of disgust and disappointment, which if nourished and watered properly with the truth, would bloom heartily and poison both of you the unadulterated sap of guilt.

My title refers to a phone call, actually. Equivocation is the stuff of titles. :)

About an hour ago my girlfriend called from her secluded lake cabin where she’ll be trapped with her family for a week. Because she doesn’t want her parents to catch onto the fact that she’s calling me, she barely let me finish my “hello?” before launching frantically into the following: “Hi so I’m calling to check in quickly mainly because I miss you but I don’t have much time to talk since the parents will be back any moment and I was wondering how you are, so how are you? - oh shit they’re at the door so I gotta go sorry miss you bye.” And that was really the extent of our conversation. Scintillating, I know.

It’s too bad really, since last time we talked we had our first real argument. It’s actually very cute in retrospect. Because immediately afterward we were all apologetic and eager to reconcile and the argument wasn’t even a quarter as intense as the pinwheel-ish lashing out my dad and I engage each other in monthly if not weekly. With my dad, it’s always over stupid nonsense; with her, it’s stuff with gravity. For instance, our “argument” was about whether it’s best to cling to youth while fearing old age (my habit) or blithely wish youth away in favor of middle aged stability (her habit). I’m all about carpe diem, and while I’m very afraid of getting old and experiencing the eventual failure of my systems, I’m wonderful at cherishing the present and my current physical and mental state. While she’s not at all afraid of getting old and dying, she’s simultaneously overlooking the beauty of youth and ostensibly will have no idea what she’s losing until it’s already gone.

So we argued passionately for a half hour about that until we realized we were being silly. She’s slightly more skilled in the art of debate than I am, I realized, and I admitted as much. I suppose it helps to be smarter, and I truly feel that she is (which is nearly impossible for me to write, my stubborn pride coating my words as it does). She’s a true intellectual, whereas my foundation has always been emotional. Her mother was reading her Jane Austen when she was nine; my dad was telling me stories about real people and asking me how I thought they must’ve felt. With emotional intelligence I blow her out of the water, no matter how many novels she’s enjoyed and analyzed, or symphonies she’s attended, or Shakespeare plays she’s seen. She can tell me what’s in the books I haven’t read, or the definitions to the words I’m unfamiliar with, but I can tell her what’s written in the hearts of men, and in this, I have the power to astound her as she astounds me.

Plus, she’s so cute. This will help her win any argument. My tendency is to say, “Yes you’re right. Look at you… of course you’re right.”

My brain has unexpectedly decided it no longer needs healthy quantities of sleep, and apparently wishes to run on an erratic, inconsistent sleep schedule. It insists on using an oblong sleep-wake cycle with small bursts of rest, and long, dragging stretches of tired consciousness.

I glance at the clock; it is ten. I fleetingly remember the old school days when I seriously considered shutting my eyes at this time. I almost scoff. Now it is eleven. I start to feel fatigued, but continue on with whatever activity my brain is currently occupying. It is midnight, and my body begins to shut itself down. The brain however is still out on the rooftops in the rain, refusing to come inside, stomping on the buildings and disrupting the entire earth. It is one. I lie in bed, like a horizontal, flickering streetlight. My mind is haywire, flying light speed through the galaxy while my body is dead, save for the aching in the bones and joints. It is two. I try to remember what it feels like to sink into the dark oblivion of sleep. To feel my body slip away, silent as a cadaver falling into deep blue the ocean; to feel my mind slip through a gentle haze where the strangest things occur and the most meaningless sentences flit around in the sky like water bugs, brilliant and unquestionable. It is three. I kick at the sheets because suddenly my entire body is raw from turning against them. My throat tightens in frustration. I want to scream, but instead I sit up, contemplate walking outside for an escape from my lunatic bed. I despise the indent in my pillow, the smell of me everywhere in the sheets. It is four, and I am suspended just above the heavenly body of sleep, reaching desperately for its little white hairs, trying to latch onto it. I am still foreign; it won’t accept me. It swims away and my bloodshot eyes stare at the ceiling. It is five. I have finally given up. I roll my cheated body out of the bed and slump in my car. I drive out past the city where the horizon is flat and I watch the sunrise. My eyes begin to shut. I realize I am smiling. I climb back into my bed at around eight or nine, and fall asleep thinking about all the creative excuses I will use when the daytime people call my phone and wonder why I never answered.

(Something I wrote some time ago.)

blue
like the shrill siren of failure

o summer dont breathe hot hate on fall
just let him lie in his spilled colors and growing blue cold

o winter dont ask spring to remember for you how it felt to be lonely
how it was when the sun couldnt touch you
how the days passed by fat and slow as continents

because miles away from this gray city my girl asked me
to peel my heart off of hers and it occurs
to me now that change is blue
and god must have known in the beginning
that you seasons would carry
the worlds bluest cruelty about the earth
in your temporary arms

Big wonderful party Saturday night; I’ve not had so much fun since summer swooped in and stripped me of college for awhile. There was much dancing and drinking and playing Monkey Hut and laughing so hard the face goes livid and the room goes blurry with tears. I knew I missed people. I knew I wasn’t a complete misanthrope.

There was one minor discomfort, I guess. A former love interest – E – was there with her current boy toy. I used to be more than a little infatuated with her in high school until I realized that she was actually an utter flake with a thousand dollar smile and some scrappy wit. Still, at the party there was a lingering physical attraction, the remnants of stupid high school love. She’s looking gorgeous now that she’s – what? 21?

Being 19, I am clearly younger and yet so, so many years older. She’s a beautiful idiot with inexplicable charm and grace. I don’t know why I still sort of shiver when she laughs and I suppose I can’t expect to forget how my 16 year old self felt about her 18 year old self in the commons after school (especially when she corners me at parties and opens her damn mouth to say things like: I still play that CD you burned for me 3 years ago…), but I’ve grown up too much to continue to want her. I’ve got things that are infinitely better now. And even if there were no possible substitutions, invariably people outgrow their angsty teenage wants when they see that life is rich and multilayered and need not be petty as the tenuous relations of high school.

Meanwhile a well-meaning ultra-conservative political science major successfully wrung my cell phone number out of me. I’m not sure how that happened. He was a decent guy, with very nice hair and sharp sea-green eyes, and as I was told by a friend when I was driving her home (she was in no condition to drive, or to have a coherent conversation really, so maybe this point is a bit fluid), he is “uber picky” in choosing girls to hit on. I was correspondingly honored, then, to have been targeted but this is where the closet gets so stifling. What can I do? His feelings could easily be spared by a casual reference to the Sapphic truth, and yet my reputation glares back in my face. Plus, even if I were straight and available (and I am happily neither of these), there was the issue of my liberalism which he would not have tolerated into the forth date, I’m sure of it. When he calls to ask me out, I’ll tell him I’m kind of a whore to my academics and am incapable of having a boyfriend currently, flattered as I am to have been asked. I could add that I have loads of female friends a lot like me only slightly more conservative and a great deal more religious *wink wink* who could be easily persuaded to go in my stead and whom he'd be much, much happier with. I’m not quite flaky enough to mention any of that though.

I woke up in my room the following morning with a few inappropriate pictures scrawled on my forearm, probably a direct result of Monkey Hut, but some parties are worth the mystery. They’re in green sharpie, and we all know about the persistence of sharpies, so I wore long sleeves to Grandma’s house for lunch. She inquired about the shirt immediately since apparently it didn’t match up to the sweltering 85 degree weather outside, so I asked her to pass the asparagus and pretended not to have heard. Grandpa smiled and smiled like he knew everything exactly, but I'm thinking that was all in my head.

A slow dismal day begets slow dismal thoughts.

Read E A Robinson for a bit and remembered my fondness for his lines. Not usually his entire poems, but the lines, how they bob pleasantly with his rhythms. Then some Robert Lowell. Lowell after this was like the harsh smack of brandy after too much dessert wine. He’s good, forceful. He takes my hand and jerks me, stumbling, into his strange sad world.

Met L for very pleasurable brunch yesterday. Can feel my interpersonal skills growing blunt and flabby; she whips me into shape socially. I must must must care for the others! I know I enjoy these friends of mine tremendously when I make myself grab my keys and leave this quiet house to its quiet devices. Not sure what is wrong with my mood; the fragile bodies of concentration and happiness have cracked open a little. Tonight, a movie. Wednesday, more talking laughing and half empty soda cans. Friday, a party and bonfire in someone’s remote and expansive backyard. Boys screaming with alcohol in their brains, girls mindlessly humoring with flowers on their tongues. I’ll do it; be present at the very least. I must, or socially parish.

Want to be much more literary than I am. Have always wanted this. To know what’s waiting in all those books that hug the walls of our library. All my vicious wants are climbing to grisly heights. They are too ambitious. It’s just this self I need. I am enough as a collection of nerves and tissues on this black ripped computer chair.

Sometimes I try to better myself, but the road to knowledge is daunting, and I get so horribly tired.

Friends are slowly growing furious. They have become undeniably two-dimensional to me, and what’s worse: they know it. Intuitively, they know. L – lifetime confidant, witty, beautiful, charming platonic L - is the only one of them that carries weight anymore; she is the only one I care to see, and it breaks my heart that I’m harboring what are more than trace amounts apathy toward these other longtime friends of mine because so many of them are wonderful people. I tell myself they no longer want me around anyway since I’ve become prosaic and faintly peevish without G (girlfriend residing in faraway impossible Wisconsin) and they’re happily allowing me to be aloof while I gather myself my previous self.

It’s not that I think it is fair to assume that it’s all mutual, just that it assuages my afflicted conscience. Ah, but I love. What do I care what these girls and boys think of my detachment if it’s only the disagreeable side effect of an exquisite love? (Still damn much.)

I’ve been trying view the summer separation from this girl as a kind of boon, functional in that it allows me to regain my former independent self (that self that I had apparently driven to the remote core of the earth unconsciously and now must find a way to retrieve) but distance from her fails spectacularly to distract me. I’ve tried everything to get my mind to swim away from her so that it can exist in shallower ponds and be blithe and free, yet behind everything she waits almost like a memory. This is nearly pleasant because memories bring her instantly back to me, painful because I am impatient for her to cease being a memory again, and irremediable because I know that it’ll happen eventually so it isn’t as if I’ve got to heal.

I’m being insufferably thespian about this, I realize. In reality, we talk on the phone every other night and I’ll see her face again on July 25th for a short vacation, so summer separation? Big deal. It’s mitigated. Yet, my feelings remain intolerable and ridiculous. They’re very Anne Sexton (minus some of the neurosis) with a pleasanter nostalgic twist of Sharon Olds.

To temper the tumult above, I’ll end on a less shrill less emotional note. My hamstrings are fraught and feel as though they’re about to snap. As in, if I were to bend to tie shoes, game over and I’m on the floor clutching and writhing. It’s all because we weeded along the perimeter of a hulking Northern field yesterday. Without hoes. Without gloves. Squatting miserably in the humidity and unobstructed sun for which I formed a pure and natural hate. I looked like an incompetent John Howard Griffin impersonator after the job had been finished, with my arms and legs caked in fine black dirt. The whiteness (well sunburnt redness) of my face probably could’ve been preserved had I not stupidly wiped the sweat off with the dirty backside of my wrist.

When I attempted to enter my house after work, my mom met me at the door with a muted shriek and demanded I let her hose me off in the lawn first. I staggered, a little drunk with heat exhaustion, to our Holstein cow sprinkler in the center of the yard while its tail flung the water about via water pressure, and my mom unhooked the hose from one of the inane little utters and sprayed my person ruthlessly. I sank down on the pelouse as she slapped my arms and legs with torrents of water, feeling more like an animal at the zoo than a tax-paying person working in the fields for income. But really she’s just a mom protecting her house from dirt, and the truth is I do love her for her domesticity, since I inherited almost none of it.

You know, I used to journal religiously. I mean, not on Oasis (I’m more active here lately than I have been in the past two years of my Oasis membership combined), but in an actual notebook made out of trees and blue ink with “Mead” in the corner. It was this tattered, helpless looking blue-covered thing where I wrote sentences stuffed with words that I thought made me articulate, but in reality probably just made me stuffy. Sentences like: “It only strengthened my conviction that Allie’s motivations will inevitably be revealed to be nefarious in nature” or, “The repulsive pedant they elected to be tonight’s orator kept spewing out loquacious strings of nonsense that blindly and rapturously praised the Institution.” With ridiculous sentences like that (trying to be Charles Dickens with an attitude), I was pretty pedantic myself, and I guess still am to a certain degree. It’s not that I need to sound any particular way anymore, it’s just that I’m in this life-long love affair with words. Even if it makes me sound ridiculous in writing, when all these beautiful, seductive words are draped out in front of me, I must have my way with them. I could try to deny my logophilia, but I know I’d just be a repeat offender and it’s so much wasted energy, kicking the unkickable addiction.

The other day I brought my iPod to the sugarbeet field to occupy my mind during the stage where we’re “cleaning the area” i.e. killing the superfluous sugarbeets outside the plots with our hoes. In the process of hacking wildly (for that’s the only way my inexperienced mind knows how to kill a beet) at the jugular – the taproot – of a redbeet, my iPod slipped out of my pocket and fell to the earth with a soft thud. I stared at it. Its shiny black body looked ridiculous against the rich brown-green of the natural ground, the ants hesitating and then deciding to crawl around it. I thought: Thoreau would leave it there. After making this observation, he would leave it there and feel good. But I’m not Thoreau and I love my Death Cab for Cutie. So I picked the thing up and put the plugs back in my ears, not hearing the birds or the wind slipping through the windbreak for the rest of the day, feeling fine despite it.

My mom is laid up with the dysentery. I periodically bring her water but never food. When I bring the latter, she croaks at me and shudders, which makes me shudder because I hate the thought of nausea. Typing it makes me want to clutch my stomach.

My dad, in contrast, is in fine form and arrived at the house to speak to me today with an argument already in his mouth. These days we argue endlessly about the same old issue: my firm decision to go see my girlfriend at the end of July. Yes, it’s costly. Yes, it’s only a short six day stay. But it’s my money, and it’s necessary, necessary, necessary. My life is miserable here in this stupid city and without the knowledge that I’ll see her in twenty days, I would be an altogether gloomy individual. I would remain immovable in my grimness, the angsty grandkid at reunions who peevishly answers “fine” to all inquiries regarding the state of my life or offers a terse “nothing” when asked what’s new. I have not retained my independence from this girl, and I’m aware that it’s dangerous to store all my happiness in her, but it’s also involuntary. Vulnerable as I am, she does the same, so we’re walking a mutual tightrope toward each other.

My guitar, of course, is a romantic and understands all of this. When I touch it, it tells it all right back to me, only more beautifully and with more feeling.
Sometimes it sounds like it loves that girl more than I do.

I am working with a boil on the ass of humanity.

The boil’s name is Hari, and he’s a self-righteous forty-something PhD who assumes I have the brain of a mollusk since I’m currently a 19 year old undergrad, despite the glaring fact that we share the same job title (“emergence counting professional” – read, “pee-on laborer”) and do the same “scientific work.” This summer job of mine is not exactly pleasurable to begin with, so having Hari around cements the general feeling of horribleness in my brain. Basically, we count sugar beets in various test fields outside the city and record our numbers on slightly pretentious little data sheets with blue clipboards. It’s science for the benefit of our sugar company employer, and the details are tiresome, so I’ll spare you them unless you ask.

Hari is Indian, his native tongue is Hindi, so his English is sometimes a little broken. This combined with his fiery temperament automatically makes him indignant and defensive in any conversation where he’s not readily understood. On the way to the field today, I made the mistake of engaging in a political discussion with him. A snipet:

Hari: “The problem is this: that-that-that illegal immigrants are too polotized!”
Me: “They’re what now?”
Hari: “Polzitized! Poltizized! Yes? You understand?”
Me: “Polarized?”
Hari: “No, no, no! They are too politized!”
Me: “Oh, politicized?”
Hari: “What I said! Always, what has been I said!”
Me: “Sorry, ok. Fine.”
Hairball: “You’re not hearing what I say to you, your ears?”

Later in the conversation, I made my second mistake when I decided to tell him why I took two weeks vacation to go to Vancouver. I knew it would vex him to hear of my aunt marrying another woman, but perhaps I was bored stiff and feeling a bit mischievous so I decided to frost his cookies a bit and come out with it. His reaction? “This is not natural, you know. You do not think it natural, correct? They are two women. Where, am I asking, is the man?” I stated my opinion on the matter flatly.

His ensuing lecture on the purpose and definition of marriage reminded me a lot of a tremendously uncomfortable situation in Minneapolis earlier this year involving me, my girlfriend (who at the time was only a friend/crush), and, incidentally, a haughty Indian man at the light rail station. I’ll tell this story in its entirety since it’s probably more interesting than where I intended to go with this entry. We were on our way to the Mall of America, it was the dead of winter and insufferably cold outside while waiting for the light rail, and we were in the process of using the biting cold as an excuse to be close. We had our arms wrapped around the other’s waist, huddling “platonically” on a bench since we were both allegedly straight and didn’t want to offend the other by admitting that being so close was actually rather electric and heavenly. There was no one at the station save for us and the Indian man, and since we told ourselves that our resourceful body heat transfer method was platonic, we foolishly reasoned it would translate into the rest of the world seeing it that way as well.

Well, the man, upon turning and seeing us there, did a double-take. He eyed us suspiciously for awhile and finally said, “Which one is the boy?” We stiffened, laughed nervously, and asked what he meant. He just stared and stared, inscrutable. We had Eskimoesque parkas on, with hats and hoods and gloves, so it was probably hard to discern our genders. “Well? You can’t both be girls if you’re holding each other this way, right? So which is the boy? Unless you are lesbians?”

“No.” My lovely warm-up buddy replied vehemently. “We’re friends…we’re just really cold.” I blurted defiantly that I had a boyfriend, since I was more than a little concerned for our safety. It wasn’t an arrant lie because I was half-heartedly dating this cute-ish blond-haired kid who still continues to be very in love with me but for whom I consistently feel nothing but friendly fondness. So. For the subsequent fifteen or so minutes we endured a lecture (bearing striking similarities to Hari’s today…almost as though they were extracted from the same doctrine) on how we should reserve physical affection for members of the opposite sex and how any trace of homosexuality is disgusting. “You want what you don’t have,” was his mantra, talking of course about requiring male parts to match our female ones, and while we were terrified at the time, we laughed hysterically about it later. After sufficiently examining us he came to the conclusion that since we were both “very feminine” we were not lesbians and probably had nothing to worry about, but we really shouldn’t be without men at our age.

Oddly, on the light rail to the M.O.A. all I could think about was, “You mean what we were doing looked suspiciously like lesbianism? Yes! Score!”

One day dear Hari will get canned for being an ass because he can’t take authority and is constantly mouthing off to the boss, but sadly I’ll probably be back at the university before it happens. Ah well. For now, I’ll just satirize him in my journal and be marginally satisfied.

What is more tedious than midday loneliness? Nothing, I think; yet I wade through it and record it faithfully, such that it would be easy to mistake it for something idyllic or at the very least subtly dyed with the dazzling colors of significance.

To cease caring about this girl now would not only be madness, it is an impossibility. And over a temporary distance problem? It would be homicide, where the mind is the scoundrel with the smoking pistol and the heart is the fellow sprawled supine on the living room floor, frantically losing its crimson sustenance. This silly metaphor reminds me a little of KT Tunstall’s Black Horse and Cherry Tree song, where the heart is the embittered rebel whose cord was cut and now stubbornly resides near the horse and cherry tree. So often KT articulates my thoughts for me with such exquisite clarity; I owe her tremendously for all of it, but there is no repaying artists.

For all that preamble, what paltry conclusion have I to offer? What unsatisfying analyses follow, and on what topics? How did the art of living optimistically float away from me as it has done, miraculously, and as quietly as the movement of air against itself? Somehow, I have allowed isolation to suck dry my garden of creativity, and simultaneously permit Vanity and her tiny glass heart to pursue and pursue me.

More importantly: why is it that I am always asking the question no reader understands or, if he might, is not willing or able to answer? Sometimes I feel irretrievably alone with myself, though unquestionably I am the one individual I yearn for a scintillating hiatus from.

I need to go home, in any case. I’m writing this in the Denver airport where people mill about me like giant unsmiling germs. Dad is off somewhere gazing at all the Denver Bronco apparel (barely variations of all the Bronco sweatshirts and tees already cluttering his closet), and I’m here on Oasis not making much sense, but feeling marginally better for having employed some cathartic words.

“One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect
the whole world looks like home for a time.” Hesse, I think.

It occurred to me earlier as I was nostalgically revisiting some of my old posts that I have always operated under the idea that if I am to be journaling here, at Oasis, the theme of my journal absolutely must be gay. Or, if the central idea in my entry wasn’t gay in nature, then I had to reference some gay aspect of my life at some point so as to justify posting it on Oasis. Like: hi, Oasians. Today I stressed about finals, read too much Sylvia Plath, saw this amazing movie, produced a half-baked poem about Newton…and oh, uh, I saw a beautiful girl at the convenience store while getting gas – see? Still gay. I wasn’t at all aware that I did this. To break the habit, I’m going to suppress my gay-news-update impulse and grace other trivialities instead.

Actually, I don’t think I can do it. Ordinarily I would be able to, but my life is so bloated with gayness right now that I’m practically seeing through a rainbow haze. I’m in Nevada, staying with my aunt and her amusing partner who were recently married in Vancouver (that gorgeous, gay-friendly haven), leading a temporary life of monotony, sustained mostly by two hour phone conversations with aforementioned gf (see any previous journal entry within the past few months for more information), and occasionally skimming the lesbian magazine “Curve” which my aunt ironically left in my room’s closet for my perusal in a very hush-hush manner - so as to avoid offending my slightly homophobic father, also present. She’s thoughtful, my aunt. She thinks that back home I’m suffocating in the armpit of conservatism or something, when really, most people are merely apathetic and rather dreary. Almost worse than hostile, really.

I’m growing very bored with Curve and its articles – e.g. “Sapphic screen” and “Lesbofile.” I need to get back home and go to work so I don’t have as much time to sit around and consider my cheerless mood, or how I’ve been reduced to half a person ever since I started going out with this girl I’m so absurdly in love with who remains miles and miles away until the commencement of classes at the university.

For next time, I’ll aspire to write a gay-free entry. Just once, I promise.

Is there anything to say? I am on the back porch. My ass, which is in the first place sore from walking the sugar beet fields, is resting agitatedly on the metal bars of my mother’s decorative porch chairs which have been stripped of their cushions. She intends to buy new ones, she tells me, but then never does. Now there are only metal bars and one old beige cushion heaped in the corner of the deck, ravished by small animals looking for home insulation, all its white fluffy guts tumbling out with the breeze.

I am thinking of what it means to be gay – this stream of thought periodically interrupted by gray, furry movements in the garden or the outlandish squawks of nearby blackbirds – and how I am less and less sure about labels as I grow older (yes, to the ripe old age of 19). At fifteen, I thought it was my occupation to go around sticking labels on the world, and there was no better place to stick them than on myself. And now what? I packed my pillow and my blankets and shirts and books and I went to the big city with its hulking university where I fell for a Wisconsin girl who plays brass in the marching band. What does that say? I don’t sit well under the “lesbian” label. I don’t see women walking in the street and find myself pining after their bodies. I don’t know how I feel about the idea of participating in girl-girl sex, or more accurately, I had an aversion to the idea until I met the girl that I’m with now. Now, touch has an electricity it never had before, and if it started to happen one night, if we found ourselves caught up in something, wanting more of each other, I can’t see myself wanting to stop her hands, her lips, her hunger, if it ever came to that. Save for her, I'm not sure I have ever actually been attracted to another girl’s physical body – to the point where I really wanted it. There were girls that captured my affection through their personalities and their dispositions, but there was never a girl whose arms I would’ve felt comfortable in or whose lips wouldn’t cause me to recoil had they been pressed to mine. I had thought about it before—way before I met her—but if it had happened, I think I would have regretted the experience afterward.

I suppose labels stop mattering when you find someone. Your heart is no longer pacing behind advertisement signs to the world, and instead, it rests comfortably in the hand of one particular person. You’re done with the ridiculous struggle of determining what it is, exactly, that you want, because there is someone that takes all of your previous wants and wishes and throws them out the window for time to slide over and forget. You fall in love, and suddenly one girl or boy has the power to give you something that is a million times lovelier than any little fantasy you could have dreamt up.

The wind is distracting me, and I found a bug crawling in my hair. Because I am in many ways a very typical girl and have fulfilled my need for the sun and have been sufficiently disgusted by the various insects that populate the world outside the windows and walls of my empty brown house, I think I’ll go back in. For me, nothing is ever accomplished by thinking like this anyway, and there are so many books to read.