michele

hiding out behind a stack of books in the library in order to spy on law boy, i tried to figure out if i could galumph over to his table, rip some pages out of his stupid bar review book and be hidden again before he noticed anything amiss. how is it possible that lying on 3 chairs pulled together and reading a book upside down could possibly be more entertaining than watching me watching him? this boy, he is here every day in my library with books and papers and a laptop and pads of paper and pens and highlighters. he goes all out. i have no idea what he’s doing. well except for how i know he’s studying for the bar. because i strolled up to his table one afternoon when he was momentarily missing and nonchalantly browsed thru the titles of his texts. he has a BMW. he wears a beanie sometimes. he’s cute, though not as cute as the art boy with the black mustang (damn….).

today i went to the random tiny balcony off the stairwell on the other side of the building and sat with my feet dangling over empty space and stared at clouds. i tried to convince myself both that it was unlikely my shoes would fall off or that i would fall off, but staring at clouds produced the imminent dread that soon i would be in that plane for 18 hours staring at clouds from the wrong vantage point. shudder. now i am back in my office watching clouds thread themselves thru sutro tower like it’s a needle. i wonder if a plane landed directly on top of sutro tower whether the plane would crush it or be impaled on it.

before lunch i got an email from my mom telling me that a boy we (adam and i) went to school with from elementary onwards, died in a house fire on wednesday. now honestly, i don’t remember this boy, (he was in a grade higher than me), but i do vaguely remember one of his brothers. the point though is that this is scary. first sophia’s (erica’s girlfriend) house burns down on saturday and now this? i’m highly (and slightly irrationally) paranoid about my house or my mom’s house burning down. mostly because of people and cats i worry, but partially also because of books, my laptop, videos and pictures and all my stuff.

the boy who died was a friend of my brother’s and also a DJ. apparently the fire started as an electrical one, maybe from all the turntables and stuff plugged into the living room. and he and his dog were found in the dining room. this is incredibly sad.

i don’t like it, i don’t like it.

the hummingbird population on this campus is somewhat astonishing. i am constantly having to tell them that my head is not a flower. no, i say, my ear is not for pollinating, shoo.

hair can have a smell. a smell of warmth and sun. i love to press my face into the cat’s side after she has been in the sun and inhale it. just now i was outside sitting with my hair in a ponytail and before re-entering the building i pulled out the rubber-band, causing my hair to tumble down around my face and the same smell tinged with flowery shampoo hit me. mmm, i said, i love that smell.

i want to be a hummingbird, lying in wait to sniff people’s hair. i want to lay in the grass with someone waiting for the warmth to infuse their hair and kiss the slightly salty curve of their neck. i want to always have that smell.

last night, i gathered together 9 willing little guinea pigs and unleashed this horrendous murder mystery game that i had written on them. for little squealing furry creatures, running around and looking for wood shavings, they did quite well. it was difficult to pry erica off the wheel and jason wanted to eat all the treats, but eventually everyone was scheming in corners and searching rooms to find daggers, crowns, bloody clothing, and packets of poison. I have no idea how many times kristen gathered together a cohort for revolution and then double-crossed them. brian danny got all anti-royalist and refused the throne. no one seemed to ever think to offer it to dianna, but then not many people seemed aware that she was also the illegitimate child of the dead King. I thought that LRRH would take the throne just to keep it from the peace-loving Prince so that she could kill giants for the rest of her days, but that didn’t happen. jolie kept having sex with people (speaking of which, mad props for seeing sleeping beauty naked a second time, i forgot that one.) jason wandered around “yoo-hooing” and had all his careful work dashed when his object of affection refused the jihad. kati vol and dianna, you two were serious schemers, excellent. gene didn’t die, kristen did. erica arrived before the food. and i didn’t even realize how late it was at 10:40 because so much was going on i hadn’t thought to check the time.

i have to say that writing this whole thing (it’s like 30 something pages total) which encompasses a whole mini-society, their relationships with one another, political factions, and overlapping information or secrets, was an amazing experience. it was fun to sit with a notebook, chewing on a pen, trying to figure out who was sleeping with who and what someone had done in the past to make someone else hate them. causes and effects all over the damn place. coming up with tiny details like betty the begging beauty or snow white and the pimping dwarves or a sword encased in poo or lying about lollies or a horse named clancy. the only inconsequential thing there is the name of the horse. and given a few minutes, a pen, and a notepad i could make ‘clancy’ matter a great deal to someone. the power, the absolute power!

i’m kind of in withdrawal now. i mean i fucking wrote a newspaper for it yesterday. and now, nothing. now, it’s done. i’m sort of sad. but, at the same time, not really wanting to write another one yet. kristen suggested, back before i started writing it, that we could maybe turn a murder mystery into our next movie somehow. and jason, last night during it, said that he wished there was a camera in every room. i wish i could have really been omniscient (with cameras) and known everything that was going on to my baby once i released it.

only 2 pictures up so far, but there will be more. oh yes. (evil witch cackle.)

note: brian danny’s (or jack’s) photos are now up too.

down on the lower campus, little chitlins are wandering around. their little faces are filled with the embarrassment that only trying to pretend maturity while being followed around by parents can produce. they’ve got stuffed folders and empty wallets, but big happy grins. and i am looking at them to see where the cheese is hidden, because surely these little chitlins must be cheesy, yes? full of brie, i think, or maybe cheddar. not everyone can be french, after all. once upon a time, though, there was a prince here. but he graduated in the spring, i hear, and his father was a king without a country living on sufferance in england anyway. much like the suffragettes. well, honestly, nothing alike. but if you could imagine 80’s hair and leg warmers and striped ensembles with large plastic pink earrings, then the rockettes could be aliens with butt implants and probes of subliminal intelligence. i am curious about this prince mostly and less about the chitlins now. because royalty is not necessarily more interesting than the wandering little baa lambs below, but it is by definition more. (perhaps of cheese?) i wish i had met him. or seen him, wandering around with the expression only being followed by a king can produce.

this weekend i also went camping. with a house. and a shower. and my laptop. plus a lot of games involving small rackets , balls, or horseshoes. and an overabundance of food. and then i went swimming with huge goldfish and their poo. and my brother shotgunned beers with 15 year olds. my cousin lacey called me ‘nasty’ (due to the tattoos and piercings). i bonded with a girl named ashley over braces. we discussed movies with a 10 year old named alex, (getting him in trouble with his mother who hadn’t known some of the movies he had seen.) i played the worst game of horseshoes with my mother that the world has ever seen. and i cheered triumphantly when james got 41 points at scrabble with the word ‘vex’.

i took entirely too many pictures with my brand new digital camera, (including some of my brother’s newest tattoo.)

the librarian’s young son (i think 5th grade) is here for the afternoon in the library and he has been set up on a computer to play some sort of shooting game with many robotic cries similar to ‘shazbot!’ and ‘all your bases belong to us!’ i’m finding it difficult not to laugh out loud and cannot wait till the austrailan comes back from lunch. admittedly the austrailian is pretty deaf and must not have a sense of smell or he’d have noticed how much he needs deodorant, so maybe the addition of a small, cute, half-hawaiian boy to the library will go unnoticed by him. unfortunately the french father is not here today to multiply this experience with delightful amounts of fun.