Even though it is still August, the ginkgo leaves outside my window are already gearing up, at the edges you can start to see a yellowing, maybe just the slightest fray, but there, nonetheless - and I am excited about change. And it was still pretty hot out today, I know, but for some reason, the absence of humidity, things just feel different. I am already in a fall mood just like those leaves outside my window and I am listening to music and it is hitting me in a way that music does in the fall, making me nostalgic. I have been listening to The Organ and The New Pornographers all day long, getting sad and giddy, depending on which band was playing and I think you know which band provoked what.

Have you seen the clouds today? I wondered if maybe they are always so amazing but it's the heavy heat that prevents you from checking them out, and today you can do so without getting blinded or melted by the sun. They are so low and so puffy and so great in number and the sky looks incredibly blue behind them. Man, oh man. I kept staring at them today, totally amazed. They make this entire town look different, look puny with that greatness floating overhead. I did laundry today and while I was doing it, I ate a burrito at Morelos that was as amazing as burrito might possibly get. I cut my hair today and I want to run away.

Hey, maybe I should mention that I talked to my dad on the phone today. I totally forgot about that because it was this morning and I am going on about a certain nostalgic moodiness and not identifying, failing to even think of it, what is probably the thing that provoked it. It was a quick talk, maybe five minutes, but the first time I have talked to him in a really long time. It's weird talking to a really sick person because I am not really sure what to say. He said he was doing fine and I wasn't going to contradict him and say his sister told me otherwise. He also had stuff done to his vocal chords. I couldn't understand what he was telling me about it, because his voice was made very weird by this process. The main thing he wanted me to do was to tell my mom he said hi. And even though his voice was fucked up and he is slowed down a lot by his approaching death, I still heard somewhere in there, the person I remembered, and it made me vaguely sad in a passing away about how things change, and people do, and then die.

I have lots of my mind and because of that, nothing is being done. Too many things going on and not going on. I need a job. I hung out with Greg last night and talked to him for a long while. I went home and wrote a really long email, insanely long, to Paul continuing our recent discussion of pop music and crushes on boys and what it means and why. And those thoughts have been continuing to flesh themselves out today way past the hitting of Send, and there might even some thing to show from our discussions of my crushes. I like trading emails with people and am excited for him to respond. Even though I talk to him in person often it is so much more fun to compose emails and trade them back and forth.

And why is that? Why is it that I love the music turned up loud on my stereo with no one else home, why I want to dance here by myself and do, and why it is so much easier to sustain your enthusiasms in the absence of actual human beings who normally if they are human will do nothing but temper those enthusiasms, why I can't make eye contact with other people, and why I am here again writing in my online diary rather than calling you on the phone to chat, or, you know, going out into that bright, big world and living?