i had half a donut at work yesterday. i couldnt blink for about 30 minutes. it was the first: sugar/flour/bread product i had eaten in 9 months. 9 months.

last night i had a guiness.

i feel fine. perhaps even better. today i will have some bread, as i continue to edge off of the diet. next weekend: pizza.

john, christina and i went to the grove last night. we wandered around, going into a lot of stores. there was a quicksilver store and i found a pair of quicksilver jeans i wanted. but not for 56 dollars. but they were baggy without being huge – something rachael asked me to try someday.

in the apple store, this guy walked by me. i think i did a double-take: he looked so familar. he acknowledged my glance, so much so that i thought he worked there and was being helpfully polite. except as he passed in his almost see through white pants, olive tee-shirt and strung out apparance, i realized it was giovanni ribisi. having just watched boiler room the other day, i was more than surprised. he went upstairs and i sent john to confirm. john confirmed. we were still pleasantly giddy when we walked out of the apple store and had the mother from ‘everybody loves raymond’ walk right in front of us. this surprised me somewhat, as moments before, i had noticed her autobiography in barnes and noble (an autographed copy even).

3 stars, 24 hours. as i pointed out, that is one every 8 hours on average. which means i saw one while i was asleep.

tonight, i go here with people. werd.

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man, i still feel my temperature rise when i remember how awesome colossus’ cameo in x2 was. rumors have it he’ll be playing a main role in the third installation. lets hope so, after bad writing and dumbness during the 90s have relegated my fav x-man to nothingness followed by death(maybe not).

in danger news: there is no danger news, things are cool.

my friends’ cat that lives downstairs is shedding its winter coat all over the place. its seven months old but looks like ten years after all the street brawls its gotten in. life ain’t easy for moroccan cats.

with my friends’ help, lots of online reviews, and having to subject myself to an infinite number of stupid peoples’ opinions i’ve finally got most of the matrix reloaded happenings down and am enjoying each viewing session more and more. i even find myself admiring the delicacy of the french dubbing – they really did a good job matching up the video and audio, as well as the voice acting being really good. apparently my friends told me the french are known for their high quality voice actors. you go, french.

we’ve started renting a jackie chan vcd movie every other night or so for the past couple weeks now and have just moved into jet li territory. at 50 cents a pop its not a bad deal, especially when we chip in together and don’t guilt someone into getting it all on their own.

i’m not sure if i mentioned this before, but i just remembered again and it still makes me mad. some little private school son of a %$#$^ from one of the richest families in morocco who is currently studying golf at some french institute in the south of france stole my cheap-ass cell phone that i got in spain. its been a couple months now. he strangely reminds me of pat, and for that reason was on my list of ‘cool people’ until he stole my cell phone the day before he left for france. rashiid tried to console me by explaining that he’s a klepto. rashiid(who’s spending the month in meknes with his fam) is supposed to be telling the little thief’s dad about the incident so as to compensate me for my loss, but i have the feeling rashiid is wussing out because he’s from a (much) poorer family and is suffering from an inferiority complex, since he wants to join the ranks of the moroccan golfing elites.

i’m hopefully going to attend some sort of modern dance/ballet thing followed by a hip hop exhibition at the national theatre this evening if the tickets aren’t too much.

peace

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I’m ridiculously tired. We didn’t get back from Cremaster 3 until 1am, leaving me only 5 hours of sleep before I had to get up to go to work this morning. I thought the movie was alright. I finally figured out what the majority of the movie was about after it finished, but it moved so slowly and was so obscure that it was really hard to get into. The summary on the Cremaster website helps out a lot.

I’m at work and I just got a phone call from my good friend Mike, who invited me to go to Greece and Germany with him in July. The Greece part of the trip would be completely free. I want to go so badly, but I already have a trip to Alaska in mid-June with my dad and brother to go to, and I don’t know how much my work would appreciate me leaving for two trips after working there for two weeks.

Here’s hoping I’m a traveling fool.

____________________

I remembered this on the way home from work. At the movie last night one of the Backstreet Boys was there. I feel sad for myself that I actually knew it was one of the Backstreet Boys. Apparently his name is Kevin and he looks like this. Brinker started to argue with me if it was really him, but he didn’t have the balls to bet me $5.

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rachael is gone.

i cant really figure out how the last 10 days went. they are so skewed – her being stuck in the apartment, having no space, etc etc…and then there is the next 12 weeks, where she is up in portland and im in la. and john will be gone for a lot of that. without matthew here to pull me out of the apartment, i fear ill become a terrible hermit and spend late nights talking to people online in fits of lonliness.

so:

if you are in la and you know me – drag me out for shit this summer. lets fucking blow the lid off this place, ok?

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HUGE reality check. i dropped off the face of the earth for a couple days as my mom was admitted to the hospital again on wednesday. my silly petty life of school and boys came to a screeching halt as i saw ‘inova fairfax hospital’ on my caller ID when i checked my messages. definite hard-stopping, tears – pretty close to hysteria during the 15 to 20 minutes it took to calm down and track down my parents.

my mom is on a morphone patch 24/7, but by this weekend it just wasn’t cutting it. my dad came home from his trip to michigan early because she was in so much pain. the doctor immediately admitted her to the hospital for observation and more painkillers. they then decided on an MRI; the pain is centralized on her back, where the cancer is pressing down on her spine. they met with the doctors today and immediate radiation of that localized spot has been ordered, starting today. so relatively speaking, this is good news – a reason for her pain, hopefully a means to ameliorate it.

but it’s fair to say i was knocked on my fucking ass. it was like someone pulled the rug right out from under me. (writing critics, piss off – clich?s are clich?s for a reason. they work.) it made me wonder where the fuck my priorities are right now. not that, per se, i can do a whole lot in terms of my mom’s medical condition, but really. thinking back and letting myself become so senseless over boys recently, acting as if a cute hookup is the some kind of momentousness…? man. there’s so much bigger than that, that this, than any of this mess.

it’s all around me right now, with so many of my friends. and it’s in me, i can’t pretend it’s not. this desperate search and obsession with the (for the most part) opposite sex. why do we put so much stock in it? what is is within our humanity that makes us so scared of loneliness? of course it’s nice to share experiences, events, life… but man, are we so abusive of our blessings that we can’t see them when we are by ourselves? i can’t pretend that i am not always on the hunt. that there’s a satisfaction and happiness i get when i look over at the form lying next to me in bed. what is it about the presence of another, sometimes ANY other, that seems so crucial?

i am disappointed in my sushi choice for lunch. i got a vegetable combo, which is fairly usual, but with brown rice instead of white. i know brown is much healthier, but i didn’t think it would make such a big taste difference. it’s super bland. poo. last week i did discover inari sushi though, which are awesomely yummy soybean pouches filled with sushi rice:

inari’s goodness makes up for my lackluster lunch. it’s the yin and the yang, man. i guess it all does really balance out in the end.

epiphanies over sushi. right, right.

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i had a dream this morning. the dream was that i was in nyc and about to marry linda. i didnt want to get married, but people had flown in from all over the country and i felt really guilty making people come out and then refusing to carry through. the dream carried a lot of feelings of guilt. i didnt like that part – the guilt-trip inside my own head.

john forwarded me the email from the girls. as stupid as the whole thing is, i almost wrote them back anyway. perhaps this was another bad idea that i sometimes use to introduce “more excitement” into my life. im always down for an adventure or two.

april (whose site i dont have here at work. i lied. i did have it in my history.) has become invisible. thats sad. more sad, once i went to said site right now and see novels and novels posted in the last week or two. perhaps the novelty of speaking to me wore out. i hope not. she was a very cool cat to trade emails with, esp when we were both bored at work.

not as sad as me getting stood up last week by kristina. that was absurd. more absurd though, is to get stood up, leave a message and, over a week later, still not have heard back from her with even a meager apology. or anything at all for that matter. stupid, immature people really suck.

* * *

this day couldnt go on any longer. no one is online to talk to and all i have been doing all afternoon is screengrabs for new video pieces. its exhausting in its own way and i am ready to go home. yawn. isnt it bedtime yet? what? i have to do this again tomorrow? wheres my “me” time?

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my time at tripp’s is almost over. i’m staying here tonight, mostly for the sake of cremaster 3. my folks are flying into burbank this evening for jordy’s bar mitzvah. its kind of scary that the little cousin, the one who doesn’t exist in so many of my cousins-and-growing-up memories because he hadn’t been born yet, is getting to be so old.

its about time for me to leave. it makes me feel like i’m in limbo living here, with nothing but brain-rot to occupy me during the days tripp is working, and living out of duffel bags, out of shirts now so i wash one at a time and hope it dries for the next day. living here has been overall nice, but its such a warped experience of what it would be like to actually live with tripp. it would be infinitely more pleasant if i had my own life here, could go out (and get back in on my own–no extra keys for me) and in the meantime while i’m doing my own thing, give tripp his space. at least he’ll have that initial period of relief at getting his space back before the missing sets in.

its been a nice visit though. lunch twice with my granny was nice. i’m going to try to make a concerted effort to see my grandparents more next year. this past semester ended up being too darn busy. while i’m looking forward to next semester as being an ‘easy’ semester, that two of the classes have outside-of-class screening times, and one has a lab, i don’t think i should get my hopes up too much.

oh, john, welcome to the site. it just occurred to me that john might be reading this. i was just about to put something about how i’m pleased at how my quiet-shy wall that existed and helped aid the phenomenon of being in teh apartment with john and both of us being perfectly silent broke down a while ago.

breakfast time. ice cream or pasta, ice cream or pasta…..pasta it is. i’m trying to eat up some of the food i haveleft in the house. oh, i have broccoli too! oh the joy. a pasta and broccoli brunch with ice cream for dessert. oh the simple pleasures.

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