MUSIC:

Boy by Book of Love:

boy (uh huh) (repeat)
i wanna be where the boys are
but i'm not allowed
i went to the side of the boys' bar
i want them to all come out
i'm not a boy
i'm not a boy
it's not my fault
that i'm not a boy
it's not my fault
i don't have those toys
i'm not a boy
i'm not a boy
boy (uh huh) (repeat)
but now it's alright
without those boys
i stay at home at night
and i play with my toys
i'm not a boy
i'm not a boy (repeat)

boo hoo.. the sadness of my life...
and i'm now downloading the garden state soundtrack because i love that song in the trailer so much, and it's really quite lovely - Let Go by Frou Frou, electronic music with heart - there's beauty in the breakdown, indeed. and now i've got almost the entire Frou Frou album, and it's very good, new music feels so new to me, these last months i'm inching back to a normal person who discovers new music periodically.. now if i could just figure out how to pronounce Frou Frou and what the hell that means. i am deep into dance music now and there's no turning back.. jenn i've got lots of daft punk and basement jaxx, but basement jaxx seems to be winning, they kick music's ass all over the place. i guess the way to get into good electronica is find good compilations or film soundtracks so off i go.

time for a big maze of melody thought! new marvelous snack creation: fugi apples with peanut butter (already a classic) AND raisens! raisens punched into the peanut butter to make em stick. it's this big fruity peanut buttery mouth explosion. alright i'm mighty talky right now.. i just had this great late night talky conversation with my brother about a million topics and it's one of those things that restores my faith in our relationship just when i'm thinking i've lost him completely to religion and girlfriends and general boy assholeness. he is, as it turns out, gloriously aware of the realities of this life and open and receptive to me and my wild energy. hurrah! i know i sound like a mooney.

i don't know what a mooney sounds like!

i feel like i've taken drugs, i told him, which i must've experienced thru osmosis as i watched them being taken in garden state tonight which has gotten me into this wonderful mood. garden state is a severly flawed movie that moved and enlightened me anyway. it's completely cliche and unoriginal in its weirdness and many lines and emotions were completely forced and out of place and it had a very today-typical indie rock soundtrack but it was also refreshing amidst everything else playing and impressive for a debut effort and it featured genuinely lovely, funny moments and seemed to create real flesh and blood people a few times in those moments that made you ache to be them and i really liked some of the songs.. so it's a 3.5 out of 5 star.. and it got me like this so that's another .25... and as distractingly gigantic as zach braff's nose and lips are, they are strangely hypnotizing and i want now desperately to kiss him. so maybe it's a 4 out of 5.

let's go backwards. it was hawaiian day at work today.. no idea why. i hated my oversized shirt, felt formlessly huge, and was unhappy to not be around austin for the first couple hours as active seller.. and then i relaxed and danced to goofy hawaiian music and talked to people candidly and we ended up playing monkey in the middle with a beach ball and all was well with the world by the end and i now realize that too much of my happiness rests on that boy already so i'm just gonna quit it.

jordan and i also talked about how i don't want religion in my funeral, because there was a bunch of religion in the funeral i went to today. a friend of the family died tuesday, terry sparrow, son of my dad's good friend bob who is smart and wonderful despite his christianity and he's the one i have long elaborate philosophical discussions with, so i feel terrible for him. i keep having these sudden slightly unimportant deaths happen around me - people i know go without warning and the end of their existence has little effect on my life because i didn't see them that often. death is such a physical transformation so if i wasn't used to being physically around them it's not going to shake me up much to have them physically gone forever. so i had to sit there listening to songs and songs and words and words about how terry was with jesus and god is so good and we'll all see terry again soon in heaven with jesus and if this isn't enough to make you believe in jesus i don't know what is (literally said) and it was just nauseating and in the end i didn't feel like i'd celebrated terry's life as much as just gone to church. so it worries me that my own death will be handled by my family who are all religious, and i'll certainly have to oblige them with religion if they die, but i had to try to plead with jordan not to let me go down like that, and he says he wouldn't and he understood but just in case he goes all batty, if i die, one of you who knows me well enough should take control of the situation and give me a nice andy kaufman funeral. play pop songs like in the big chill. you know what i'd like. jenn, i'm mainly talking to you. i'm expecting you now to be around for the rest of my life until i die so you can take care of me. you need to see the big chill and man on the moon to know what i'm talking about. they should be on your list.

friday night i rushed to a 12:30 showing of hero, another 4 out of 5. the story gets too thin and tedious by the end, but it doesn't change the fact that it's maybe the most visually stunning movie ever, and the first half was really awe-inspiring fantasticness, so many arrows, such beautiful asian cultural simplicity, such amazingly choreographed and fx'd fight sequences. and everyone is beautiful in this movie. except maybe jet li. but i got full on crushes on flying snow and broken sword.

that afternoon i finally attended my new french 1 and it's wonderfully NOT taught by the evil kypraios lady but instead a nice laid back female version of mr. wilhelm.. well not quite, but definitely relaxed and groovy, the way foreign languages should be. jordan sat in with me because he had nothing to do and we had a grand old time relearning simple french phrases. i still love the hell out of that language. everything is either hilariously pig like or gorgeous and sexy. those french are sexy pigs, you might say.

thursday i covered for the lovely jaime at work but sulked and had a terrible time of it with the excuse that a friend had died but i was really annoyed about school being not what i expected and especially morose about austin not being there and his fucking girlfriend ashley. you see, wednesday night was a mix of terribly wonderful and horrifyingly bad. i was scheduled to work with toni, whom i enjoy but obviously i'd rather have austin. well austin's car was there when i got there ten minutes early. i figured he was just leaving. only he wasn't. he was just coming on! toni called in sick and had him cover for him because she's a doll who knows i want him. there was no attempt to cover my giddy grins for the first like hour.. for a moment i fantasized that he had called her to switch times so he could work with me, noticing we weren't scheduled together all week. it was a regular wednesday night finally, reasonably slow, and he was in a good mood so we talked and laughed and joked and teased and slightly flirted for like 5 hours, i needed a ride home and he agreed to give me one, and i thought i was going to explode with joy, damn near completely convinced that he was on to me, that he liked me too, and that this was the start of a beautiful something or other. then around 10 o'clock the phone rings and it's a cheery girl looking for austin.. yea sure, who's this? i knew damn well who it must've been. and we don't ask who it is. "ashley". ashley. just like that. like she owned him and she'd called him here thousands of times before and this was the most regular thing in the world. not like, his neighbor, i think his house is on fire. his neurologist, he needs to schedule a CAT scan. just ashley. i had picked up the phone while i was doing a transaction and somehow the computer sensed my sudden drop in heart rate and screwed something up in the price and i had to fumble for a minute with something incredibly simple, not even fully registering who i'd just spoken to. i finally finished and had to find austin to be the bearer of some sort of fucked up tidings, he'd come walking out of the back office and i stopped short from running back there and yelled across to him that ashley was on the phone. he made no sign that there was anything significant about this, no look of dread or curiosity as to why the girlfriend he had broken up with was calling.. no embarrassment or awkwardness about her identity revealed to me.. just chirped "ok" and turned back around to take it in the office. fuck me. i fumbled thru more customers as the door to the office seemed to never reopen. i finally remembered that i could just look at the phone and sure enough, a good five minutes later, he was still on with her. he popped out later looking fresh as a daisy, no strain from a stressful conversation painted on his perky face, chipper and ready to keep working. so yes, all else sank and darkened, i silently did work and tried not to look at him, realizing more and more our first fun hours were surely just aftereffects of his having a lovely afternoon with his still-girlfriend. i had resolved to start to stop caring about him by the time i got in the car and there were no butterflies. his car smelled like crayons. we made lazy, uninteresting conversations for five minutes, with a few scattered holes of nothing-to-say. he dropped me off, i said bye like it didn't mean anything to me, like i was tired and ready to go home instead of sit next to him forever. listen to the words that are coming out of my keyboard. i'm talking about this fellow like i'm in love with him and that is utterly impossible, we barely know one another, it's been less than a month since i started taking earnest interest in him. why must i go to such extremes? it's not healthy, is the moral of this tale, and so as i stated above i'm trying to quit him altogether. we'll see how that works out.

in the end, i'm going to be writing a 40 page script for a class i'm taking wednesday mornings called writing for tv/film, and it's going to be about a mary kay lady, well, about a lady who becomes a mary kay lady to fill a void and thinks her life is leading up to that pink cadillac. tonight would've been a good night to start that. i was talky and eccentric and creative feeling but once again i waste my energy on narcissistic ramblings. well, it's 4:30 in the morning. one has to waste energy on something.

let's try this again. i'm at the end of my first day at school and i've been freezing and slightly wet for the past, like, six hours. never wearing sandals to school again. i've been walking around with socks on underneath my sandals, and feeling stupidly self-conscious about that like someone will point it out to a friend like white after labor day which doesn't even really exist... how bizarre. speaking of bizarre. what a delightfully bizarre film i just saw in Women in Film. Orlando, directed by Sally Potter who i could've sworn directed Jesus' Son, another delightfully bizarre film, but didn't, it was Alison Maclean, and now i'm disappointed. she did do The Man Who Cried, tho, too weird for its own good, and The Tango Lesson, a movie that's been on my list for years, can't quite remember why. and you know that when i say list i mean it literally. that's one of the first ones and it doesn't seem to be dwindling, only growing because i keep adding to it and ceasing to want to watch the old stuff. so we'll watch lots of interesting movies in women in film and the trade off is we must give a ten minute presentation at the end of the semester JESUS GOD FUCK and i very nearly dropped it just for that but dammit.. maybe i'll just do it.. or maybe i'll pull the fire alarm.. or run away screaming.. or get pregnant and have an abortion the day before and come in crying to the prof about women's rights and men are scum and she'll automatically pass me.. um. and the professor is this older german lady who says she's a filmmaker and voila i've looked her up on imdb.com and there she is.. ula stockl is her name.. fascinating. her films are all tiny unknowns and range in length dramatically from 67 minutes to 205 minutes.. fascinating. maybe she'll turn out to be my woman filmmaker mentor. my italian film professor is this slightly british 50ish gay man.. slightly british, i know, but the accent goes in and out i swear, bizarro world. he is amazingly uncertain of himself, won't look anyone in the eye and instead gazes at the back wall like it's an old friend, poor chum.. he lulls us into slumber and i fear for my health now that i know how much time i'll be spending with him. these two classes are in the same FUCKIN FREEZING classroom in the communications building.. i will bring two sweaters, socks and tennis shoes, and possibly a scarf every tuesday, my god. it's must be literally 50 degrees. so i escaped italian film because i sit myself in the back of classrooms by instinct and then couldn't read the damn subtitles.. it's on reserve in the library, i'll find it. so i ran outside into the warmness and it was raining but not too hard so i went out with my umbrella and got my legs and feet soaking wet, great, and landed in the computer lab in classroom 1 just in time to start typing this report and have the power shut off in the building just long enough to lose it.. no big deal tho, it was kind of exciting. the sun finally came out and i sat and baked and dried out, finished A Home at the End of the World, and had that great just-finished-a-book feeling as i drifted thru the crowd back to class.. it's so interesting that there can be so much going on within us that no one around us knows about. the day started at 8 this morning with an early french 2 class and guess what! i've dropped it! yea, i really didn't want to chicken out like that but i was in wayyy over my head and i didn't want to drag people down with me.. see it's for their benefit. so i've signed back up for a french 1 that makes me now go to school every day of the week which SUCKS but c'est la vie and all that. unfortunately it's with the same obnoxious prof i had this morning.. mrs. kyprais who IS french and loves to speak it incessantly while we all blink and watch her.. goddamn you kyprais. i miss mr. wilhelm more than any of you will ever know.

go here: http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox_searchlight/i_heart_huckabees/ and watch the trailor for i heart huckabees.. this movie looks hilarious. it's gonna be fantastic.

school starts in a couple days and i have to start remembering french and thinking creatively and speaking publicly and figuring out how to get everyone to and from work and school with one car AH! it's crazy and i'm nervous. my brother has to spend over $500 on books. jeezy creezy is right. and you know i just remembered there's this little presidential election going on.. what the hell.. how is one supposed to keep up with that when there's all this other stuff to do? so i have no idea what's going on with all that. i'll be showing up for election day and that's about all i know. i wonder if fahrenheit will be out on video by then... that would be good campaigning. ok nothing else new is happening really. next episode: "Oh my God I'm back at school".

good morning...afternoon.. i'm going to have to strain myself to keep this blog from turning into a romance novel.. but not yet. i'll report about other things in life some other time. i've had dreams about that boy for like four days in a row now.. this being the morning...afternoon after we closed together you'd think i'd be all swoony but it was a mixed night so i'm sort of..balanced over here. 5-close. we didn't talk for the longest time, he was quiet, there were a lot of people to get thru. i misread him and created this whole horrible situation in my head where someone told him i liked him and now he was avoiding me.. i completely convinced myself of this and would curse the ceiling whenever i walked back to get a game from a drawer or something. i'd look over sadly at him whenever he wasn't looking. yea, it was dramatic and when i realized later that he was really just stressed about the store being so busy on a wednesday night i realized how vulnerable i was letting myself be and quit it.. i had to stop letting so much of myself go so i smartened up, stopped thinking about him and started having fun with customers. i guess me relaxing relaxed him a little and we started talking more. we talked about his website (austin-burns.com) and about acoustic boy rock and why he didn't like the rules of attraction and i became completely resolved in the fact that it wasn't me at all that was bothering him. we got everyone out, ordered pizza, i put on jeff buckley for him even tho he owns grace, but he says he only listenened to it like once. so we listened to sex music while busily finishing returns. it wasn't sexy tho, we were too busy, it was just kind of interesting. the best parts of the night were when he finally stopped to talk and he made me laugh or i made him laugh and he has this great.. get ready for this jenn.. sunshine smile. ; ) he lights up rooms. he is also one who burps loudly like a kid and sneezes with that sound cartoon characters make when they fall off cliffs... ok enough. i'll be getting more weekday nights with him probably and after hurricane pandaemonium it won't be as busy and all will be relaxed and lovely.. you just wait.

finally, my love, you've come back to me.. let me wrap my arms around you, dear internet, lights, sound, air conditioning, stove, television! i am lost without you! or at least some of those things. i did so miss my background distraction noises, the ability to turn on music whenever i walked into the bathroom. the ability to see a goddamn thing in the bathroom. warm showers! oh how i've missed you! no matter how hot i am, a cold shower still feels shocking and wrong. cool, fine. but not cold. the fridge is a wasteland now after we threw everything out, i absolutely hate that, i've always hated wasting food. a summary: the power was off from 8 o'clock friday night until 9 o'clock monday night. that was enough. i appreciate it now. thank you.

i thought i'd have relief by way of air conditioning at work but no we were open without power for some ridiculous reason.. but not so ridiculous when i walk up and there is austin in the warm darkness to greet me, "good, someone's finally here!" we were alone and i wished it would stay that way but it didn't. no harm. we all talked and laughed and had fun, he bought us ice cream from next door, strawberry for me, a crazy chocolate chip/cookie dough/brownie/mayhem concoction for him like he was twelve.. adorable. and then the power was back on and he blurts "fuuuuuck" and it was so out of character for him, i laughed. we had to start all the renewing process.. correction, he had to. his tasks would slowly build and he'd rush his hands through his boyish hair and feathery blondness would fling everywhere. he'd walk fast but never bump into things. we always seemed to be stuffed in some corner together, i often needed to brush up against him to reach things as he stood forever on hold on the phone next to me. there was one moment when we were both silently doing returns next to each other in the back and i was hit with that intimacy you sometimes feel with someone who's near you but not speaking to you, tho i'm always sure they aren't feeling it back. we were slowly working from the outside in towards one another like lady and the tramp, and i told him so. a woman couldn't get the toy she wanted for her kid and was unreasonable with our power outage situation and austin started arguing with her, no more sympathy for the people who couldn't understand why every one of their needs couldn't be met during the crisis, he did not give in and sounded like he was losing it, he would not back down, i stood inches away from them looking down and away from him, not wanting to embarrass him or enrage him anymore.. sometimes i'll try to calm my dad or my brother when they're really upset and it only makes it worse.. she left and he stormed off, i really wanted to touch him. i asked him a minute later if he was ok and he brushed it off with a yeah casually, i meant for my words to be softer so he'd recognize an island amidst the stormy seas but it came out louder and intimacy was lost. he worked so hard that night, he was brilliant, i called him a shining star before i left. he's the best manager: as stressful as a situation gets he never takes it out on us, he never gets impatient with us, he's always the first to think of the quick and easy solution. i didn't want to go, but it was kind of time. i drifted out on my cloud and returned to dark humidity and tried reading my book, eventually got him out of my head enough to concentrate on bobby, clare, and jonathan.. and the phone starts ringing. it's about midnight and the corded phones are all going berserk. dad's in bed and jordan's out. i've got books stacked up against the inside of my door because it won't stop moving with the wind thru the window. the candles are all out, i can't see a damn thing out there. i'm not wearing pants. so i eventually make my way and i've missed the phone but the cell starts ringing, so it must be jordan, but i don't recognize the number. hello? "hey, melody? it's austin from work." austin from work he has to say, if only he knew. i stammer "hey, how's it doing? i mean, how are you going? i mean.." he asks if he woke me, i say no no no but can't think quick enough to tell him what i was doing so he'd believe me.. i run outside and he needs to know when i left so he can clock me out properly, he decided to close since being there at 8:30 that morning.. what an amazing employee.. i told him so and he said no problem like he was doing me a favor, i guess he can't think quickly on the phone either. he offered to put me down for an extra half hour since i wasn't supposed to work and i came in anyway and did such a good job.. i said i wouldn't fight him.. anyway, not a big deal conversation but a lovely little reminder of his existence in a moment i wasn't expecting him, after i'd put him to bed as it were.. you could call it a shot of austin.. tsk tsk, look where i've found myself. this is probably what most people go thru, i just talk about it more. i probably shouldn't have put all this detail here, but i really felt like it. it's on my mind. it won't be like this again probably. i'll be more discreet. this is the first legitimate, based-in-reality crush i've had in an eternity.. maybe ever. well. this is the first that could actually make sense, turn out to be something. there's no turning back now. i am over the moon for this boy.

kinda wish i'd had a camera, i'd be flipping thru pictures now. enormous thanks to will for throwing such a wonderful party, and for all of you who came, i really loved seeing you, i had a great time. let's speak in haikus about the last four days:

thursday: actual birthday at gator's

don't like gin too much
sitting next to pretty boy
welcome drunkenness

where is drunkenness?
can't decide if this boy is
sexy or just dumb

hey now, there it is
is frank climbing a ladder?
let's talk in back seats

friday: collateral

tom has a nice ass
shoot up that night club, cutie
and i dig the grey

throw some more popcorn
say goodnight, but don't want it
i think he's flirting

saturday: party

fuck shit i'm nervous
but jenn cools down everything
singin in the rain

oh my god he's here
where are those other fuckers?
i'll entertain him

going thru motions
shit, am i doing this right?
he's staring at me

fluttery stomach
dammit he's got to go now
tell me that's not all

what lovely dancing
so glad they like the music
love the disco ball

this boy smells so good
i love my nose on his neck
yea, he'll do for now

give everybody
a little to spread around
touch everyone once

want a piece of cock?
and the spotlight's all on me
it's overwhelming

where would we all be
without a bit of drama?
but she won't shut up

a little brian
she doesn't believe in fags
where's her underwear?

sure, i'll take some kiss
a burst of energy, whoops
sorry about that

cock-a-doodle-do!
let's dish next to the church crowd
speak into the mic

our cock diner for
our cock conversation and
that's noodle salad

sunday: gay bar

tiny cars get lost
but we couldn't have missed this
flaming gay beacon

where's brian kinney?
first drag show is fabulous
wait, did she have tits?

now a little drunk
dancing with gyrating boys
sweating and smiling

the beat is in me
we have no genitalia
i am one of them

channeling brian
the whole world's gone and i'm here
feeling this new self

i wish i could just post a picture and then do a normal post under it instead of this "caption" bullshit because i can't figure out yet how to make the font smaller like i like it now but heyyy who cares it's my birthday and i'm a little drunk, by myself, "hm, intresting", i love this picture. i love this show. i love these boys. but it's pretty much over for us now so i'm going to slowly ease my way into moving on. sigh. unfortunately i've made all these wallpapers so it'll be like keeping a lock of hair in the pocket of my jeans or something for a while.. never dreamt of doing that, don't know where that came from, ew. so very excited about my party, tho a little disappointed maybe in the turnout, lots of outoftownthatweekenders can't show, too bad, i hope it won't seem sparse because some blockbuster people may be there and now i feel the need to impress them and engulf them with people so they won't get bored. i know. i have a big crush on one of them so hopefully he'll show and you can all see me make an ass out of myself. oh dear, i hope he doesn't fall in love with jenn...this is the only problem about jenn i foresee having for my entire life in the future. soo....yeah... i saw before sunset last night and it was completely amazing. such a sense of urgency! it was so real and got me in such a trance! completely fantastic. it's hard to explain. you feel like you're eavesdropping. you're a little embarrassed that you're listening to what is obviously a real conversation between two real people. only it's not - and that is very jarring as i walked out, because it wraps you up in that world so perfectly and it fades out just right and the music is still playing and you could easily just sit there in the seat and feel that way for a while but that's what everyone else was doing, only about 6 other people in the theatre but, i felt like leaving first, so as much as i loved the experience and wanted it to last, i got up almost immediately and hesitated at the door a little to hear that last little bit of song, and smiled and still felt the movie and then opened the door and sauntered out and could still hear it a little and then the door closed and i took a few more steps and it was completely utterly the real actual world again.. completely bizarre.. i can't believe how sucked in that movie gets you. it's really hard for me to imagine they're actors and they aren't really in the process of living happily ever after. i wish you'd see it so you'd know what i mean. anyway, here's to engrossing movies, gay sex, and being as legal as i've ever been. cheers.