long days

Oh my goodness, MC Hammer is on the radio! Wow. This is weird. Anyways, I'm practicing typing fast since I got a lead on a night shift data job. Medical records oh the fun. But they base your salary on your typing speed, so I need to practice. I haven't done a lot of heabily concentrated typing since I quit my job at the newspaper. So type away I go. I can usually breeze my way through the tests if I practice. I tend to slow down in the long run.

Billy Idol is on the radio now. Wow. I made an 86 on my astronomy exam, whee. Ten points over the class average. I feel better. Now if I can just figure out what in the world a parsec is and why I should care.

I got a package from someone special yesterday with a wonderful assortment of strangeness. Marshmallow Peeps, Pokemon toys, a brief note, paper flowers and the freakiest catalog I've ever seen. Bob Barker the Nation's Leading Detention Supply Company. Think juvenile hall, think prison. They have everything from snacks to restraints to beds to hair nets to a body cavity scanning device. Wacky. I don't even want to know why they are getting this catalog.

Yesterday I wrote some sitting in Metro. Just a page of nothing. But it was nice. Suzanne and George lost their cat Teela over the weekend. Apparently George is just devastated, and he had tissue samples sent to A&M for preservation. So one day I suppose he can have his cat cloned. Hmm. I feel like my mom when I talk about animals. I suppose that she has rubbed off on me in some way other than genetics. Well, if I was going to pick any part of her that I would want to emulate, her empathy and skill with animals would be it.

It's way to humid. I can see the water hanging in the air. Yuck. I really don't want to go out there. I have Czech class though, and I should take that book back to Professor L. Maybe I will sneak over to the Economics building and tell Warhol how neato his hair is. Really I just want to stay home listening to 80s music and work on my stitching. I'm making a pansy. It doesn't look like a flower yet, but I'm getting there. Soon.

(no subject)

"There are two means of refuge from the misery of life - music and cats."
-- Albert Schweitzer, French philosopher, physician, musician, and Nobel Prize winner

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
-- Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist

"An idea is salvation by imagination."
-- Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect

"Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls."
-- Ingmar Bergman, Swedish film and stage director, writer

"My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water."
-- Robert Bresson, French film director

"Photography is truth. And cinema is truth twenty-four times a second."
-- Jean-Luc Godard, French director

plans and adventure with Karen and Jim

A day of adventure. I just got home, sigh and my feet hurt. I walked around campus in the sticky air with Karen today, and then we rode the bus back north. I took her shopping for lovely underwear and then back to campus for her rehearsal. We wandered through the Coop and found exciting books: a Chinese dictionary for Jim, French novels for her, and a fantastic modern Russian novel for me. After I dropped Karen off, I picked up Jim and we embarked on a quest for the biggest stuffed monkey in town. Which happened to be at Toy Joy and cost an insane amount. We bought flowers at Central Market and I helped Jim get everything coordinated so he can surprise Karen tomorrow.

The basic plan: He's borrowing a car tomorrow, borrowing a key from one of her roommates. So after classes he will buy jewelry for a fancy double tongue piercing, go home, grab the giant gorilla & flowers, sneak over to her place while she is in class and stash the stuff. Then when Karen gets off work he will sweep her up, take her to Mushashino's (nice sushi place). The gorilla and flowers will surprise her when they go home. It's so crazy and so much effort.

He bought me an incredible flying squirrel stuffed creature at Toy Joy. It has big round shiny eyes. It all just made me remember my high school boyfriend Michael, who would do stuff like this. Find carved wooden animals I had mentioned once, pick out these incredible earrings, find my missing comic books. Just thoughtful things. He bought me the most beautiful flowers for Valentines. I miss that. The thoughtfulness. The creativity. That classic romatic kind of gesture.