10am Thursday morning.

It is 10am. I am still in my night gown but I've bothered to put my glasses on (why? they're not real, anyway). There is a load of laundry swishing around the washer. I have a pile of books strewn across my living room table and a shift to work at 5pm tonight. I'm listening to: old Looney Tunes, the sound of two of my cats wrestling each other and that washer I mentioned earlier. Things are alright.

I write this because I normally hate mornings like this. They drive me crazy. You remember when you were in grade/middle/high school and you were sick (like actually sick, not playing hooky you douche-bags) and you'd be laying in bed-- it was around 10am you would wake up (I mean you're sick but COOL you got to leep in) and just lay there with your swollen throat and puffy sinus and wonder if your friends wondered where you were. What were they doing. Were they making fun of Mr. Preggir? Because his nose looks like a dick? Then it hits you: you miss school. You miss feeling not sick and your friends; maybe not school. Suddenly you feel useless and gross- no amount of shower can get this layer of "sick" feeling off of you and you haven't done any homework and you've just watched cartoons all morning and coughed into a pillow and whined at your mom.

. . . I sincerely hope that's what other peoples sick days were like, because I'm going to feel fucking stupid if they didn't. Anyway.

This is still programmed into me- hanging out around the house at 10am = being useless and gross. Especially if I'm still in my pajamas. For some reason I'm totally okay with it today though: I'm being productive, I know I have to work later (even though that's usually frustrating also; I HATE closing shifts when I have nothing else to do during the day. I just sit around and wait for work to take me like the hand of death in the night #dramatic) and I know I have homework to do. Usually at this time of the day I'm itching for an excuse to leave the house; go do my work somewhere else.

But here I am. All is well. Viva la Thursday morning.

Total Side Note: Has anyone else gone back and watched Looney Tunes as an adult? I liked watching them when I was a kid, but listening/watching them as an adult, the writing is really clever and the timing really is fantastic. Sometimes I still really want to be an animator. Is there some kind of degree in the historical impact of cartoons? I'd be on that shit.

A few things on the subject of "literature". Largely cheesy.

Literature and the analysis of it is the ability to rip the skin off of everything with words. It's beautiful, having that much power over text; any text. I feel so thankful and inspired that I have the ability to work with it like this. On this level. I feel like books let me understand them sometimes, not the other way around.

This is the few things I'm confident in. Literature makes me feel so confident, makes me feel intelligent but makes me feel tiny, insignificant and, for lack of a better word, stupid. It humbles me. I will never completely understand it and that, in itself, is comforting. This is a realm I'm comfortable in my insecurities and lack of understanding.

A theory is that literature is completely defined by the community and the environment; if you're involved with a church-- your state, your government, your peers. . . those are what determine what is technically literature. I found this amusing before I realize I'm surrounded by other English majors. Who also are the ones that study theories like this- that we only think it's literature because this group said so. Not really worth delving into right now (I'm pretty sure I'd give myself a migrane) but interesting, none the less.

The physical world holds no place for me. I find my comforts in line breaks and the indents of paragraphs. You are flesh and blood, but I am a semi-colon wearing a human skin. The sole purpose of these hands is to hold a pen, and moments spent doing otherwise feels a waste.

"My words become me. I suit them."

(The Invisible Man)

Bye summer, hello fall!

Summer, I hardly knew ye. But I got a 3.5 over summer semester (overall GPA is still in the toilet so. . . boo on that) and read a total of 10 books. Not as much as I would have preferred, but not bad. Not bad at all.

So! Fall semester! Taking:

• French! Haven't taken this since high school so it should be an adventure.
  
• Literary analysis! Largely fun because I get to abbreviate as "lit anal".
  
• American Lit 1! Online! Fuck!
  
• Expository Composition! Also online! Double fuck!
  

Been getting SUPER into zines since I moved my friend up to Portland. It's incredibly hard to immerse yourself in something when there's none of it around you. Boo. To Etsy! In the works of. . . 4 or 5. Haha.

Wow my life is boring. I'll make a "FALL SEMESTER" reading list later.

"I hung out with bear yesterday and I forgot how amazingly awesome she is even when she is sick. I keep talking about how grossed out I am about this whole thing but I keep forgetting that bear told me everything out of love. She felt bad for lieing to her best friend and I respect her for telling me. I love her so much. She thinks that shes a shitty person but honestly shes the best one I know. I wish I could be halsf the artist, writer, comedian, and person that she is. It surprises me how well she can mask her feelings when shes around so she doesnt gross me out. I think that im about over the grossed out phase and mght be ready to be mad at my sister for cheating."





Woods deleted her blog, but I saved this because I'm an egotistical asshole and this. . . honestly made me feel a lot better when the whole 'situation' went down. Love you bro, thanks for carrying me up that hill.

SUMMER READIN, HAPPENED SO FAAAST.

SUMMER READIN'.


DONE!
Novels/books:

• Bret Easton Ellis; American Psycho


• Rob Bell; Love Wins


• Virginia Woolf; A Room Of One's Own


• Virginia Woolf; Flush, a biography


• Kurt Vonegut; God Bless You, Mr Rosewater


• Patton Oswalt; Zombie Spaceship Wasteland


• Virginia Woolf; Jacobs Room


• Rachel Caine; Glass Houses


• Virginia Woolf; A Haunted House and Other Stories


• Anderson Cooper; Dispatches From The Edge
  

Short stories/poetry/plays:

• Charlotte Gilman; The Yellow Wallpaper


• Zitkala-Sa; Impressions of an Indian Childhood


• Edward Albee; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The "to do" list:

(either the authors names have escaped me or I'm too lazy to type them. No one reads this anyway. . . so I don't really give a good goddamn. Not even a bad one.)

• Sylvia Plath; The Bell Jar


• Knut Hamsun; Hunger


• MORE VIRGINIA WOOLF (Orlando, The Voyage Out, A Writers Diary)


• Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

To be updated as the months progress. Yes I'm including school reading because shut up, it takes a lot of time.

Hm.

I have no morals and thus my ideology is flawed. Your hands are my place of worship, your hair my temple. Theists will argue with me (quite admirably I might add) that I am only praying to my own psyche, not a body that was once mine. But I will repeat, I have no morals. I am fingerprints without a criminal record and you are the police.

We'll kick down the fucking door. Open up. Open up.

This was never our story but selfishly I can admit it was only mine. I was hindered by ventricles and nerve systems. Your morals are only chemical reactions and I can admit to my lack thereof. Where are you hands when the world is ending, where am I without a head of hair to come home to. I miss this religion, I am desperate without my faith. I will keep my eyes closed while you answer the prayers of others, I will be jealous of their connection.

I will keep my eyes closed. I will keep my eyes closed and pray for a chemical reaction.

We're married to the vultures, ba ba ba da da ohhhh yeah.

For the full effect of my rambling, I suggest listening to the song "American Vultures" by The Blood Brothers. For full effect of said song, I suggest you listen to their album "March On, Electric Children". To get the full affect of said album, I suggest you listen to their entire discography and mourn them with me.

Anyway.

There is a distinction between "old" and "new" vultures thanks to convergent evolution. (Take that, biology class I failed) "New" vultures are the ones we have largely in North America-- hawks. "Old World Vultures", along with having the coolest friggin name ever are also the more traditional, intimidating, hook beaked (Accipitridae) birds that are grade A nightmare material.



Side note that these birds are what resemble the plague doctor masks; which as creepy as they are, aren't as interesting as I would have hoped. The hooked beak looking part of the mask was to keep potpourri and pleasant herbs as it was believed that it was the smell of the rotting dead was the cause of the plague. Good job, guys. Sometimes I want to go back in time, explain to them what community college is, tell them that I attend it, and then explain to them all the mysteries of the world that they can't figure out are. BASIC ALGEBRA WOAH. Anyway.




This is Lammergeier, or the bearded vulture. Let's go over this.

1. Holy shit, this thing is fucking terrifying. I'd shit everyone's pants if I saw this son of a bitch in the wild somewhere.
2. They are HUGE. 10 foot wingspan. It would probably eat your dog. (maybe)
   
3. No seriously this thing is freaky as shit. I'd put a collar on it and cart it around on Halloween and be like "BOO MOTHER FUCKER".
   
4. Bonus! They look like they're wearing bell-bottom pants. Hah.
   
5. DOUBLE BONUS. It has a mustache. LOOK CAREFULLY.
6. Yanno what Lammergeier means in goddamn german? Lamb Vulture. It will eat your livestock. (this isn't proven, this was the 1700's and everyone was crazy. Simply a belief they held)
   

COOLEST BIRD EVER RIGHT? What I particularly enjoy about it (besides my now fully developed fantasy of wandering around with it on a collar. . . partially thanks to the Blood Brothers-- OR IS THE VULTURE WAAAAAALKING YOU?) is that it doesn't eat rotting meat like most vultures- it eats the marrow. It has this developed technique of dropping bones off onto rocks to crack them open to get to it that can apparently take 7 years to master.

However, Iranian mythology considers the sight of one good luck.

Shit is fucking ridiculous. There's something poetic to be said here for a vulture that looks like a cracked out vulture from hell that doesn't eat rotting meat like other vultures. How lovely and strange to be the epitome of your species and to take it raise yourself into a hellish level by denying a rotting corpse, pull out its bones, crush them, and eat them.

Unfortunately I'm not feeling poetic, I'm feeling like a caffeinated asshole. Maybe later.