shit. frank is leaving in like a week and i can't for the life of me get together with him. things happen so fast. meanwhile i get an email from marianna today detailing all of her trip so far on semester at sea - cuba, brazil, and south africa so far - and my god, it's amazing just to read it, to think kids get to experience this stuff, and in such a wallop - she'll be all around the world by late april. she saw fidel castro give a speech! but apparently he's a loon. listen to this: "He likes to have a 'dialogue' with us, allowing us the opportunity to ask questions and him the opportunity to answer. In the entire four hour 'dialogue' there were (I'm not kidding) four questions asked, two of which he did not want to answer or could not answer. He speaks very much like a senile grandfather. He'll start to answer the question in some weird abstract way, and then get distracted by some other random thought, then, two hours later, come back round again and answer the question directly. So here were a few of the topics discussed: The population of Tanzania, Cashews and the spelling of cashew, how writing on a baseball is like putting your hand on the world, so don't put your hand on the world, China and how he went there a long time ago and liked it, the price of books for both Americans and Cubans, and how he imagines the price for Americans to reach up to Mars, and lastly, but most importantly he spoke 45 minutes on VCRs and how everyone in Cuba seems to own one. Oh Fidel. The funniest and most exciting part of the entire speech was when, in the middle of some other random thought, he announced at 4 p.m. that we had to return to our ship by 8 and walked off stage." what a world.

i had my field trip to the dali museum yesterday. it was a mixture of great and hot and kind of bad. unfortunately the whole thing wasn't scheduled correctly to where the gap between breakfast and lunch was about six hours and the time spent at the museum was around 5 hours. which is about 4 hours too long really. it wasn't all that big and it was crowded so you felt pressured to not linger on a single piece for too long or else you're blocking everyone's view, or smelling a stranger. the art was great really. i've never been a big fan because it feels too trendy and after reading orwell's critique of the autobiography i felt like people like dali are maybe just the scum of the earth, but upon seeing over 100 original works, everything from 9 x 12 foot extremely elaborate portrayals of chris columbus' discovery of america to tiny pencil drawings of naked women from his adolescence to the disappearing bust of voltaire to jewelry and bizarre eating utensils to a masturbating hitler.. it was really interesting. watercolor and pollack-style paint-spraying and cubism and surrealism and sketching, he just used all forms of visual art medium and it was really impressive to see all of this eclectic work done by one individual. i really enjoy the paintings where there's double imagery - like this one where you see in the foreground a boy sitting by a river with his head in his lap and behind him is the exact same shape only it's a hand holding an egg, and before long you can't look at the boy's head without thinking it's an egg.. after a while he didn't seem deviant at all, he just seemed funny and sexual and eccentric in a good way. the persistance of memory and all that stuff still seems a little dull to me, but here i am anyway, a dali convert.

it wasn't a nate and melody day of fun. some new things have happened since then, mainly gary has entered our group so now we're a fun little threesome in the back of class. gary was in my moses, jesus, and muhammad class last semester and for a while he seemed like he was a christian but then he revealed he wasn't so i was always a little confused about him. yesterday i learn that he is 30 years old. which is, wow i really didn't know that. and he also grew up right down the street from me on northern way by dyson.. so hm. he's very friendly and talkative and he makes good eye contact so of course i get this impression that he likes me. which makes me kind of like him. or at least think about it all the time. so nate and gary and i get the very back of the bus where the three of us can sit together. which is cute. and then we find that kristopher-with-a-k is on the trip and he comes and sits in front of us, which is nice at first because he's very good-looking. he and nate have a lot to talk about because they're kind of obsessed with beer, sports, and video games, so they start to pair off and me and gary start to pair off. gary and i are sitting close together so our legs and arms are always touching and when he talks to me he kept looking like he was looking at my eyes and then down to my lips so i was um, alert let's say. if girls could get erections i often wonder where and when that would happen to me.

so we have a bunch of good conversation that's funny a lot because he's a little bit of a weirdo with an offbeat sense of humor and i keep making fun of him for being old so that's all nice. and we end up losing nate and kris at the museum so we walk around and around it together talking about the art and talk about dali vs. freud and dali vs. orwell with this hip professor that was on board with us and go outside and wander around looking for the mysterious "other museum" that was supposed to be next door but didn't actually exist and looked at the yachts docked next door to the museum. the whole day was kind of gary and melody's day of fun, with a little bit of eating and interaction with other kids, but by the time we were back on the bus and it was getting dark, still sitting close, more listening to his classic rock favorites than talking, i kept getting this impression that i was very much locked into this moment between us, i was experiencing this intimacy, but right when i expected him to say something to me about it he would laugh and comment on some conversation that the boys were having behind us. which makes me kind of fall into a pit of how i'm too desperate and maybe if i wasn't always looking i would find something or some self-deprecating crap like that. so we piled off the bus and my ride was already there so i just walked off and looked back and gary had looked back to see where i was and we waved and that was it. so i have no idea. i couldn't have put myself more out there without feeling like a complete idiot. i start thinking that's the problem, that i'm not giving enough signs that i'm into it, but dammit i smiled and laughed and made eye contact and asked all about him and touched him a little bit, anything more would be ridiculous and that's not who i am. i hate it how you never find out things are going nowhere until you get your hopes all up. but maybe i'm wrong. he's selling me a tv for my living room to replace the high-pitched-sound-emitting one that's maybe giving me a brain tumor, which is very good, and i'm picking that up tomorrow before class, so maybe some interesting thing will happen. whatever.

ok SAG time.