Look, even Google used to be young and pimply!

The turkey holidays, for me, have involved a lot of forcing myself to write boring/stupid essays about my leadership skills. God, I feel talentless. Thanks, college.

Today I used Google Image Search to find out what a cravat is. I could comment on the wonders of the internet here, but I might come off as sarcastic.

Anyway I’ve been sort of half-assedly reading about AIDS all day. My extended essay might get done sometime before December 7, at this rate. Yes.

Thanksgiving is, what, today? Yes. Too soon after Nov. 2 for me to summon up much gratitude. But I like that my cousin gave me something like five pounds of chocolate in a two-foot glass vase (why?) for my birthday, yay.

Ryan reports that this website has a pop-up and does other unsavory things. Is anyone else experiencing this? Ryan is a trustworthy sort, though he is known to wear ‘i heart macs’ shirts in public places.

Birthday-age was definitely worthwhile, though I got sick on the 19th and have been putting off downtown festivities since. Eventually, though.

These two days are pretty much a formality. I did nothing of import today — the school should just have given me more time off.

Yay, I’m seventeen! I feel like I should have more poise by now. I have virtually no poise.

People have been super-fantastic, to my bewilderment and glee. Jason surprised me utterly with Altoids, the sour kind, in Statistics class, despite being in Pittsburgh. I can’t stop eating them — it’s terrible, I can’t feel my tongue any more. Everyone else seems to enjoying them, too (Vickie: “Can I have… five?”). I’ve developed a reputation of communism with my food.

And Eamon sent me a birthday card in Russian, which he doesn’t speak at all, as well as a magnet from the University of Baylor, which I don’t like at all. Thank god for online dictionaries and fundamentalists, and Eamon!

Today, I like everybody! Yes, even you.

Am finding it increasingly hard to work. I’m a sad tomato!

Birthday’s this thursday. Mom wants to do something — probably sushi, yay. Everyone should like sushi. I’m thinking I should be able to get a few scarves out of this.

I don’t understand the excitement over the Scott Peterson case. It’s odd that people have chosen this one murder victim as particularly tragic and this one murderer as particularly reprehensible. It must be that the two of them are attractive enough for TV. Apparently, people are driving from all over to pay their respects to Laci Peterson, to whom they “feel a connection.” Bokonon would call the entire affair a granfalloon and have done. People are still dying in Sudan.

This really, really pisses me off. (edit1: props to Arman for showing me this) (edit2: oh, I just found out that video is from Bush’s gubernatorial race, not 2004. That’s less terrifying)

I’m loving how cold the weather is nowadays. Cold in the Texas sense, of course, but still cold enough for my uber-neat black wool peacoat, which makes me feel like a Soviet spy. Today I spent some twenty minutes sitting on the cold ground and staring at a tree and trying to elicit some poetry. It was a nice tree — an aspen, I think, with sparse leaves shivering in the wind, against the grey sky. What am I missing? Where does it stop being boring?

I’m sitting across from several idiots in the school library, and they’re talking about the Flight Club soundtrack, and this entire episode is going to ruin my love for that Pixies song.

Bohemia West, Frontage Roads’ fundraiser, went just swimmingly. All of those skinny guitar-playing boys are pretty fantastic. I should learn to play guitar, too, to cure myself of these infatuations. I think if I wasn’t so musically illiterate the whole music scene would cease to impress me so much.

I love this!

On the election: I don’t know, I’m just not thinking about it. Jon Stewart said it best: don’t you miss election fraud? This time we just lost. The next issues of Newsweek and the Economist will both feature a smug-looking George W. Bush, the bastard, on their respective covers, and I don’t think I’ll be watching the news for a couple weeks. Sorryeverybody.com involves solemn, funny-looking people feeling accountable to the universe for George W. Bush. I must be more or less safe — I’m middle-class and straight and not pregnant, a soldier, an Iraqi, etc — but it feels like things are about to go to hell in a handbasket for everyone else.

I’m engaging in some 2AM narcissism as an act of purposeless rebellion as well as for its own sake; I’m digging out the old archives from my 2001-2002 weblog on Pitas. Reading entries from 9th grade, I find myself embarassed and disillusioned. I have been clinging to this image of myself In My Youth as this precocious, charming child, and apparently I was an incoherent cretin in 2001. My prose was awkward and weird and, most unforgivable, plagued with little text faces (like so: ¬¬; ). I was such a 13-year-old. Worst of all, this entire ordeal will inevitably repeat itself over three- or four-year intervals until I plateau.

God, I talked about myself in third person. Why would I do that? I still do that, don’t I.