May 19th, 2003: I am an impulse buyer. Totally. I'm the person who all of the 99¢ nail files and electronic toothbrushes and craft glue hanging by the cash registers in grocery stores are marketed toward. I'm the person who looks at all of those things and thinks, "Hey, why the hell not?" Fortunately, I've conditioned myself to look and not touch.
But on Friday, I had the impulse to buy a digital camera. I just felt like I wanted to have one. So I bought one. An HP Photosmart 850. Completely drained my checking account. It's got way too many features and way too much power, but by God, I'll learn to use it and I'll like doing it.
I'm such a materialistic ninny.
And speaking of being a ninny, the toilet bowl to the right is the very first picture that I took with my new digital camera. The water looked particularly nice in the sunlight today, and I thought to myself, "My, I'd like a picture of that." So I took one.
Impulsive, yes.
May 6th, 2003: Ahh, Seis de Mayo. A lot like Cinco de Mayo but with a lot less drunken idiot neighbours of mine throwing beer bottles off of their third-floor balcony.
I saw one of my aquiantances from high school today on campus. I was standing outside of the Science and Engineering Library with my friend Ben-who-won’t-marry-me-because-I-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-South, when I saw Bruce, my old chum from high school In the Know and Mock Trial approaching. I had to look at him twice, though, because he’s now disgustingly skinny. He was never fat by any standards, but he’s now a little twig-ish. I rubbed his tummy for good luck and asked him how he’s been. He’s triple-majoring, for God’s sake, and already has his real estate license. He said that he stopped hanging out with all of his drug-riddled friends, took up sports (if riflery is indeed a sport), and discovered that he’s gay. No, actually, he didn’t tell me that part, but you just kind of know, you know? Good for Bruce, I say.
I also went to my first-ever poetry reading today. It was a requirement, naturally, of my Introduction to Writing Poetry class, which I am officially the world’s most fervent advocate of. The reader was Howard McCord, who has climbed in the Himalayas and tooled around on glaciers in Alaska and is from Texas and writes poems about how weird Ohio is. He has a poem about how Ohio needs to have a fjord. He likes the smell of rocks. He wrote the line, “Old loves are better blurry, best forgotten.” I like that Howard, I do.
I like Howard especially because he gave me reason to talk to this guy Bryan from my poetry class. See, Bryan wears dress pants with his thrift store t-shirts and writes about everyday things in really brilliant ways, and I hate him for both of those things combined. Hate him because I love him, that is. So when I saw that we were both reading the school newspaper while waiting outside of the room where the reading was to take place, rather than strike up some witty conversation about one of the articles, I became more engrossed in my restaurant review. But when I made my way into the room—a good five minutes after he did, mind you, just to make it seem like I was unaffected by him—I sat down beside him and asked, “What’s up?” He acted all surprised, as if he hadn’t noticed that I was taking the seat next to him, though there was emptiness all around. I asked him to tell me his life story but then stopped him and asked firstly how long he’s been writing poetry. He said that he had never written it before taking the class, which made me glad and jealous at the same time. Beginner’s luck is one thing, but when our teacher is claiming that she wants to steal parts of his poems and he’s only been writing for a month--why God, why? We talked a little about music because of the Belle and Sebastian t-shirt that he was wearing and then my friend Paul joined us and Howard began. The greatest part of this little tête-à-tête was realising exactly how nervous Bryan is. Looking at him, you know that he’s one of those kids who had the choice of being ultra-dork or ultra-indie rock and just happened to like the right kind of music to keep him cool, but still, I think that he was very unsure about what to do with me. I like that about Bryan.
I should mention that I’m getting new roommates for my senior year of college, which begins in about four months. The whole living-with-cousins thing didn’t quite work out, which is not to say that we’ve really had any problems. It’s more that we’re relatives before friends, so we end up spending all of our time out of the house in our separate circles. So next year, I’m living with two girls rather than two girls and one boy, and hopefully, we’re going to be in a large townhome rather than a large house with heating bills of $500. (No, seriously.)
The new girls are named Holly and Esther. I’ve mentioned Holly before, I know, because we met in our dorm last year and have gone thrifting a few times together. We’ll she wrote me an e-mail last summer and told me that although she already had a roommate for this year, she wanted me to keep her in mind for next year. And so I did. She wanted her friend Esther to live with us, as well, but Esther had already signed a lease when we began talking. Even though Esther wasn’t to move into her new apartment until September, she was already having problems with her roommates-to-be in March, so we convinced her to attempt to get out of her lease and sign with us. Not an easy feat, since her roommates-to-be wanted to spite her by not allowing her out of the lease. But they finally relented, and so here the three of us are, hunting for a place to live.
That’s all background information, though. The point of the story is that the three of us met for Mexican tonight. We’re a brilliant combination, really. I’ve never met people who like Mexican as much as I do, yet Holly shares my sentiments that marrying a Mexican man who knows how to cook would be the greatest thing that a woman could ever do for herself. So tonight, I walked to Estrada, the Mexican patio bar at the corner of King and Neil avenues, where I found Esther waiting. Holly joined us a few minutes later, and we discussed pet rabbits and life plans and the difference between “amoral” and “immoral” and the way that both terms apply to my life until our enchiladas and fajitas arrived. Being with them makes me excited for this fall. Excited about which one of our housing prospects we’ll choose and about where we’ll embarrass ourselves in our matching Hershey’s t-shirts and about all of the sopapillas we’ll eat.
I’ve been on this kick where I’m putting myself in social situations that I would usually not bother with in an attempt to not seem so damn detached from everything, so when Holly mentioned that she was going to have to force someone to go with her to pick up a TV from a stranger’s house after dinner, I volunteered myself. More quality Holly time; more socialisation instead of . . . well, whatever the hell it is that I do when I’m home alone. Implied masturbation? Perhaps.
So Holly took Esther and me back to her house to get directions to the house of the person we were going to get the TV from. Holly’s current roommate has three dogs, so I entertained myself with them for a few minutes. I’ve really been into pets lately. Especially rabbits. And big dogs. I want a big yellow Lab or any flavour of Setter Spaniel just about as much as I’ve ever wanted anything else in my life. The thing is--I’m not a dog person at all. They smell and I’m not willing to wake up at 6 AM to walk them and I won’t take the time to train them and I’ll never take them to the vet and yeah, they smell. But my sister brought her little Beagle home for Easter, and sweet Lord, I’ve wanted one of my own since.
We dropped Esther off at her house and then drove over to Chambers Road to this apartment complex for the geriatric. This woman, Ulku, was giving away her 19” TV, because it no longer works, and Holly wants to gut the thing and make a fish tank of it. Brilliant, if you ask me. But still, I didn’t know what to expect of a woman named Ulku living in a geriatric apartment complex. She was young and foreign and gave Holly a lesson in name-pronouncing before she led us to the TV. Her apartment smelled like a mixture of Jewish food and old lady. She didn’t ask any questions about our plans for the non-functioning appliance but just wished us a good night and told us that her heating and air conditioning are included in the price of her rent. It’s good to be Ulku.
It was a good Seis de Mayo celebration, I would say.