thursday december 6 2001    |    12:42 a.m.

i'm trying to make myself not cringe. actually this is an ongoing effort. reconciling the sap and the cynicism. luckily for my self-esteem, today i was cleaning out a drawer in my room so i could store my tapes ( a wealth of embarrassing 80s pop gems, grunge, mixtapes, debris, and def leppard ) in it, and naturally i came across the requisite highschooliana in the process:

bits and pieces of journals and letters to friends. ( which assured me that at least i write better than i did then, and i'm a little less tacky. i hope. )

a note from a little ( early ) boyfriend which reads, and i have to quote, "hey my mom said i could go to bayside tonight so meet me after school at the library. you better be there! love ya lots, nick." dude. awww.

and then a small piece of paper on which i scrawled some notes one night this summer at the hospital. the last line

tengo que recuperar a esa niña sin límites.

and this is why i will not permit myself a single eyeroll. and why i am prepared to indulge the hell out of myself, like rob brezsny suggests. because it's about damn time. and because time won't wait for me to figure things out, as i am finding more and more every day.

last night we went to happy's and i picked up the tab, because i finally can. we spent too many dollars on the jukebox and kept up a buzz, and talked very honestly and openly and also, believe it or not, laughed. and hugged a lot. i think patrick was relieved.

i also got some serious music love in the mail from this boy, and someone on the replacements mailing list sent me a tumbler from the turf club (!) in st. paul, and needless to say that made me happy. not to mention an e-mail from daniel that read like one of our kenyon smoke breaks.

i'm still not ready to face work again tomorrow. sunday was that shitty. but i'm taking friday and saturday off for of montreal and for the hell of it, so i should be ok. i've been "consulting" with ed on miscellaneous matters, and with a few more swift kicks to the seat of my pants, maybe i'll actually be doing things i want to be doing relatively soon.

the last one was about cycles. this one's gotta be about negative capability. things can't stay too orderly for too long, or i'd get bored. that's not frivolity; it's a fact.