name: amber
age: 22
location: new orleans
aim: sapgirly mail work
February 28, 2002
There's this guy in my auto tech class, Dave, and he has a girlfriend. But he flirts with me all class long and it sucks because I know he loves his girlfriend. That's actually one of the things I really like about him. He's completely sweet. Bastards. In any case, it's strange because I had a really big crush on him sophomore year. He was in my fundamental visual arts class. He didn't really know me then, but I pretended like I knew him and developed this fat crush on him and he never even knew (which is so typical of me). In any case, he started dating this chick Ashley and then I quit that. So now he's dating this chick Andy and he really loves her and I know it but I can't help it if I'm attracted to him and he flirts with me. You know how the slightest touch can just feel so heavy and lasting? Yeah. Ahh, it's irritating. And he brings up the senior prom, all the time. "So...do you have a date yet to the senior?" Of course I don't. "You should go with my girlfriend and I. We'd have a threesome." Don't you have any friends I could go with? "My girlfriend's into chicks." Bleh. My life.
Speaking of senior prom, can I really ask Stephen (the freshman)? I don't think I can. I have no intention of going stag but I don't know if that level is one I can sink to. Plus, Liezl brought up an excellent point today. "Can he go?" she asks me. I was dumbfounded. I had never even considered it. A freshman's curfew is bound to be 2 o'clock or something. That would never do. In that scenario, I would rather go stag. Senior prom is in San Francisco's City Hall. We're going to bash around town all night and paint it red. I can't have no pumpkin that has to be home by midnight. Who in the fuck am I going to take?
I have decided to sit down today and watch TRL. Yes, yes, I know, it's lame, but I don't know any of the current music. Phil and I were at a restaurant the other night and the "new" Britney Spears came on. She said "Phil, it's your favourite song," but I had never heard it before so I couldn't take one of the lyrics and make a joke that reflected back on her, making it her song.
"Wherever You Go" by The Calling is #10. I've heard this song on the radio lots of times, but I don't find anything special about it. The first time I saw this video (I think that would make this the second time), I was very surprised to find that the lead singer is this Backstreet Boy-looking kid. I thought it would be a darker, older, fatter guy. Goes to show my Counting Crows bias.
"What About Us?" by Brandy is #9. Brandy!? I find it amazing that she has made a comeback. She was big when I was in the 5th grade. The 5th grade was an interesting transition in my life. I used to listen to soft rock. I loved it. I mean, I loved it, the same way I love CC now or poetry or really good fiction. So, in any case, that wasn't cool and it still isn't but I didn't know back from front in the 5th grade. There was this chick, though, whose name I can't remember that somewhat took me under her wing and tried to make me "cool." She told me the right music to listen to (TLC, Boyz II Men & ...Brandy). I knew she was using me to make herself feel better but I didn't care because I was cool. I've never heard this song before.
#8 is Britney with "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman." This video is interspersed with bits of Britney's new movie, Crossroads. Let me simply say that this looks like one of the truly bad movies of our time. And furthermore, she's standing on this cliff singing "I'm not a girl" but she's wearing this horrible bikini top bit, showing off her ...womanness. Let's hear it for irony.
#7 is "First Date" by Blink 182, which I think I own... but honestly, I didn't think the Blink 182 CD was that great. There was this one really cool song, "Happy Holidays, You Bastard." It's so funny, in that stupid "I'm laughing but I don't know why" way.
#6 is "Uh-Huh" by BK2. I have heard of neither this band or the song. It looks like Immature. I guess groups nowadays don't want to admit that kind of stuff. Immature was great. I bumped that stuff all through the 6th and 7th grades. My cousin gave me the Cd. She thought I would love it. I did. (Side-tracking more: I'm reading this book by Vonnegut right now, Slapstick. It has taken me a very long time to pick that book up because I was afraid it would be bad. I read Slaughterhouse-Five last year and I liked it so much, I was afraid that if I read anything else by Vonnegut, that it would suck and I would be let down again. By let down, I am referring to both Irvine Welsch [Trainspotting] and Anthony Burgess [Clockwork Orange]. I tried another book by each one of these authors and was severely disappointed. Then again, maybe everything Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote sucked but he just stumbled upon Scarlet Letter.)
#5 is (god, I can't believe I'm watching the entire hour and a half of this show) "All You Wanted" by Michelle Branch ... and my brother said she was headed for the dumpster after that "Everywhere to Me" song. This is a very cute song. I like Michelle Branch in the same way I like Hanson. She has a place in music. It must have been very difficult for her to break through.
#4 is by Shakira: "Underneith Your Clothes." Never heard this one either. She has a very old, classic voice, beautiful...it reminds me so much of something, but I can't put my finger on it. Some chick my mom used to play when I was young.
#3 is (invariably the top songs are the ones that really suck) "Girlfriend" by N'Sync. Phil and I said we could be N'Phil.
#2: "Escape" by Enrique Iglesias.
#1, being retired today, is "Drowning" by Backstreet Boys. Euck. Goodbye.
This guy's article wasn't necessarily excellent advice, but I definitely liked this:
No matter what your audience size, you ought to write as if your readership consisted of paid subscribers whose subscriptions were perpetually about to expire. There’s no need to pander. Compel them to re–subscribe...Links and word of mouth can go a long way, but don’t expect a big following right off the bat. You might never get a following. More than ever, you’d better be doing this to satisfy yourself, because it could be your only reward.
So though I probably will never get a big following (yeah, hi Lisa and Torrie, if either of you are still there...) or...any following, I think it's important that I do keep up the quality of my writing and it's important to remember that I am doing this for my own satisfaction, if for no other reason than the fact that writing in a notebook is a lot slower than typing. You just have to remember HTML tags.
On that note, let me show you the best poem I read today as part of my modern poetry assignment for English:
Separation by W.S. Merwin
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
Goddamn. It's so simple and beautiful it kills me. And just because my poetry page is now down and will probably never come back up, let me post my favourite and what I consider to be the best poem I've ever written:
Exhausted Blades
These days are entrusted
with razored edges.
The phone rings—cuts a little deeper.
On this clichè rips the scar a little more.
I am Romeo and have not felt the wound.
I am Juliet. I am one day coming,
a fretful bird thrashing its wings,
dropping golden feathers to the floor,
raked against a cage of broken dreams.
I wrote that on October 17, 2000. It got me $64,000 in scholarship money (more if I spend more than 4 years at Tulane). I can feel my writing and it doesn't feel good. I'll think of something people would want to pay for next time.
I have been playing Final Fantasy X for 5 days now. I need to cut it out. And Phil has lost faith in our delegation. Why are people so damn stingy?
I have four days left to lose my virginity. In four days, I'll be eighteen. Someone, come fuck me.
I wrote this in physics today based on my reaction to the song "Barely Legal" by The Strokes and "Love and Addiction" by Counting Crows. I played the song in my head and after the first line, it just went from there. If you don't know either song, then don't worry about it. e.e. cummings also played a role in where I put the beginnings of each line. I'm drawing from many sources, today.
You don't have anything I need
nor a whisper
nor a breeze
nor rain falling down on my face in the
middle
of summer, clean and cool.
And that's not what I mean to say to you
to you
all dressed up and ready to go,
to you
wrapped up in your own desires
when I rip open my lips and blow a kiss.
You don't have a single thing to make me happy,
except maybe your eyes
but who needs eyes
except to see?
Except to see that I am all by myself here
but one has to draw the line somewhere.
I leave for five days and my twofavourite online services (besides blogger) are going out of business. What shit news to come back to.
By the way, since envy.nu and virtue.nu are now gone (which I'm sure will send a tremendous ripple throughout the web community which will be very interesting to watch), I am forced to remove my other pages (including poetry). If I can find a website that will not put ads on the page, they'll go back up. If not, then everyone (ha) will just have to live without (ha). I haven't been writing much, anyway. Sorry for the inconvenience (ha), but it's not my fault. We all saw this coming -- free website hosting is inevitably going to fail -- all of it (except, of course, for hosting services as part of a company that has outside revenue, like geocities).
30 Second Shpiel To Explain This Sentence: Why did the dot-com community fail?
Easy. When these businesses first popped up, they created their own market. It's much like Boiler Room, or at least, my understanding of it. These businesses all borrowed money to start up and then they used it for advertising, on other sites. Those sites used their borrowed money to advertise on other sites. Basically, it's like the physics principle of conservation. In a closed system, all momentum is conserved. If one wishes to slow down one part, one must speed up another part. However, energy is always lost to friction and so...eventually...the system will come to a stop (on earth). Much like the dot-com revolution. These companies did not offer any services that needed to be paid for. They made their money by advertising but at the same time kept other websites in business because they were spending money on advertising. Only the sites that offer pay-for services will remain. Envy and Virtue have been around for a long time and now they're gone. The internet community weeps for the loss but we knew it was coming. Of course it was coming. If a company is making its entire revenue from advertising on their site, it's going to fail. Going to fail. And now I guess I belong to Geocities like everybody else.
The Olympics is a really magical, incredible thing. I was watching this skiing bit just now and this guy was breathing so hard, he had all this spit coming down his face. I thought ew, but that made me think about people in general. All people get tired when they do something strenuous. How odd it is that we are all the same. I was watching the men's halfpipe (cool) and Heikki Sorsa had this pimp-ass mohawk thing going on and I thought that kid was really cute and would probably be really cool to talk to ... if I could speak Finnish ... if I ever saw him. But that guy doesn't speak English. I don't speak Finnish. Blows my mind, man. We're all just the same but we talk different. (I guess articulation isn't coming across here, either.)
I may never in my life have seen anything so strange as the Biathlon. Yes, the Biathlon. Shooting and cross-country skiing. What a strange combination.
I have just finished the novella Heart of Darkness. It was not the best piece of work I have ever read, but it was entertaining nonetheless, which is much better than I can say for quite a few other books. Next, I am supposed to read Things Fall Apart by Achebe. The cover looks very interesting. I fear it is one of those "cultural" books we are required to read so it's not all stuffy white guys from the 1800s. Really, the problem most likely lies in the fact that we need to readjust what we call "a good book" or "classic literature."
This biathlon shit is weird.
Hooray for Betsy! Dave, Curt Johnson and I finished putting our engine together today. We must have been on this project for 3 months now but we fired the bitch up and she purred like a kitten. It was beautiful. I personally torqued every torque-requiring bolt in there and damn, it feels good. Auto tech looked up for once. And my brother thinks he would make a good auto mechanic.
And why in the shit are books and movies so expensive?
And one more thing, the Antioch Public Library sucks. It really sucks. No Fight Club, no She's Come Undone, no Anais Nin, no Henry Miller. Not even any Irvine Welsch. What's wrong with these people? I finally have time and ambition to read and nothing. Nothing at all.
Book Review: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Hunter S. Thompson
My description for this book is one long acid trip. While I have read books of this particular genre/theme, what I find lacking in this book is that it can't decide. "Duke" tells the story very calmly and with perfect, normal description while every 5 lines, him and "his attorney" are taking mescaline, LSD, amyls, etc. Mildly entertaining but not over-the-top, I found myself compelled to read this book and finished in 2 days and 20 minutes. Very easy-to-read. Excellent for a crazy Saturday with nothing to do. B-
I'm watching C-SPAN and "Senator Edwards is attending a house party hosted by Democratic Party activists." This is about the most boring news I can think of. However, Phil once told me that the strangely attractive guy from Youth & Gov told her he sometimes sits at home and watches C-SPAN for hours. Imagining that we're watching the same thing is kind of erotic. I pretend he's thinking about me and waiting until Valentine's Day so we can talk (first day of the conference). But he's probably out doing god knows what and having fun. Actually, he's probably watching the Superbowl like the rest of the world. Only Channel 2 is covering it. That's pathetic. But at least my parents are out of the house. ::sigh:: Is it really so wrong for me to hate her?
mason jar version 5.0 is released. It's not much unless the image loads which it won't half the time. Damn, I hate free hosting. But enjoy if it does download. I think it looks pretty cool and it was really quick and easy (45 minutes -- a new record).
the road turned out to be too long, sugar
cuz when i'm pressed up against these answers
it's too harsh, yeah, but you knew it would be.
a long time coming, always on the tip of my tongue but
the tip of the iceberg is what you see
when you look in my eyes
say i'm too hollow. i turn away.
"meet other singles just like you"
is a bitter, bitter, bitter reminder.
i always hated AOL but more now--
like to pretend that it's seeping in
when i'm over my head
and baby, you write my blues for me
when i take my last breath,
over the walls and under the bed.
Today. Like it? Yeah, I know. I'm bad at improv. But it's all improv.
It's really inhuman how I have no concern for my mother or her causes. Our water heater broke yesterday night and the guy's fixing it right now. It's gonna be $700 dollars and she comes into my room expecting to do god knows what and says "we're never going to get out of debt." She says this at least three or four times a week, looking for pity or something. But she got herself into this (with Elliot's help, of course). They like to blame it on us like they have no control over their own expenses. I haven't personally been paid allowance for years and if I ask for money here or there I end up paying it back with groceries and the like. The only outstanding expense I charge on my parents (besides food, lodging, etc.) is my Youth & Government ($700 a year). I hardly think that got them $100,000 into credit card debt. If they had lived moderately when they had money, it wouldn't be such a crushing blow now that she's lost her job. I have no pity for her or her stupid causes. I'm out of this house and it's troubles in four months. Though it ultimately affects me like a bitch because there isn't any money to send with me off to college, I'd rather work and take in my own low-interest debt than have to sit in this house and listen to her bitching. How many people honestly hate their mothers? I mean, I hate my mother. I like my Dad alright and I get along with my brother a lot more nowadays but I can't stand my mom. She acts like $700 is the end of the world. She just borrowed $7000 from my grandfather (and half of it's already gone). These people have no idea how to live. They're idiots. Not only have they filed for bankruptcy, but when they do get money like that to hold them over (and mostly for property taxes), instead of saving it as buffer money (for instance, to spend on broken water heaters), they run out and spend it like idiots. They buy new clothes, ask Jerm and I if we want anything (and that's a big mistake), go out to dinner all the time. I swear, if I had been running this family since I was twelve, we wouldn't be anywhere near here. We'd be just fine. Damn, they're bad at managing money. Even I have $1000 left from over the summer. Four months.
I love my playlist. Especially the ones I've starred. I can get into practically any music. I was dancing my ass off to "Heard It Through the Grapevine" at the Salv Army yesterday. (Ahh, love.) PS-- "Wild thing, I think you move me. But I wanna know for sure! So come on, hold me tight...You move me."
Hotel California -- The Eagles*
Wild Thing -- The Troggs*
Wanted Dead or Alive -- Bon Jovi*
Freshmen -- Verve Pipe*
Lady Marmalade -- Mya, Christina Aguilera, etc.* (fuck, I put a star on all of them.)
Virtual Insanity -- Jamiroquai (but not you)
I'm Real -- Jennifer Lopez & some guy (or you)
Tuesday's Gone -- Lynyrd Skynyrd
Boys of Summer -- Don Henley
Don't You Forget About Me -- Simple Minds
Bleed American -- Jimmy Eat World
Motown Philly -- Boyz II Men
Sweet Dreams -- Eurythmics
Walk Like an Egyptian -- The Bangles
The Middle -- Jimmy Eat World
Half Breed -- Cher (or you)
So at Meditations for Inner Peace today (an afterschool club of which I am the president and ex-only member), I decided something. There's this freshman and I'm pretty sure he has a little crush on me. Not positive, of course and hey, I'm probably wrong, but I get some very nice vibes from him (and I'm a senior). What I decided is that I'm going to be okay with that. This may seem like a common sense answer but, believe me, it's not. There are a thousand reactions one can have to someone that has shown interest.
Take, for instance, my buddy Liezl coming up to me today and telling me that Josh McCarthy is considering asking me to the senior. Now, Josh is a perfectly nice guy and though I would say I am just as shallow as every other girl (::cough cough::) I would be willing to go with someone I don't find attractive if we're pals. But I am not pals with Josh McCarthy. I haven't talked to Josh McCarthy in 9 months. Furthermore, he took Liezl to the winter ball and it seems like girl-hopping to me. So that is one reaction. I said, "eh...I'll think about it." But of course my mind was made up then that, yes, of course, if he asks me straight out I'll say yes but I'd rather he not ask me so I can go with someone I plan on having an excellent time with. And I'm not fucking him, goddamnit! So there's one reaction.
Another is totally getting into it and deciding that you're going to be reciprocal. For instance, Scott White. Scott White came onto me all summer so one night at a party, I decided that I wanted some action, so I took him upstairs and he was too much of a pussy to do anything. But hey--I made the effort and that's what's important. So there's reaction number two.
My current reaction is to just go with the flow and be cool with it. My intention is to cross each bridge if they ever come up. The little guy is cute and I've gotta hand it to him, he's got ambition. Big-time actor, my friend is. But then again, I'm four years his senior. So I'm gonna be cool with it if he likes me and if he doesn't, I think we'd make great friends. (Side note: I never say "mmmbye" when I'm hanging up. It's always "bye" or "later" or "okay, see ya") But I refuse to bow down to liking a freshman. I mean, hello. Four years is a huge difference. And I am not saying I like him. I mean, that's ridiculous. What I am saying is that I could like him. If I wanted to. I see potential, but I will most certainly not bend my emotions that way. And trust me, I have the power.
